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Travelers Indemnity Co. v. PCR Incorporated12/9/2004
ured and strictly against the insurer who prepared the policy. Thus, intentional act exclusions are limited to the express terms of the policies and do not exclude coverage for injuries more broadly deemed under tort law principles to be consequences flowing from the insured's intentional acts.
622 So. 2d at 470 (citations omitted). The same principle applies here. We must interpret the phrase "bodily injury by accident," as used in this insurance policy, "in accordance with the plain language of the polic as bargained for by the parties." Id. If the policy's language is not plain--if it "is susceptible to more than one reasonable interpretation, one providing coverage and the other limiting coverage," Swire Pac. Holdings, 845 So. 2d at 165 (quoting Auto-Owners Ins., 756 So. 2d at 34) (brackets omitted)--we must resolve the ambiguity and interpret the language "liberally in favor of the insured and strictly against the insurer who prepared the policy." Swindal, 622 So. 2d at 470. In other words, the coverage clause must be interpreted in accordance with our general principles of insurance policy interpretation. We cannot limit the scope of the term "accident" (when not defined in the policy) narrowly to cover only those circumstances deemed "accidental" under principles of tort law or workers' compensation law.
Our decision in Turner rested squarely on tort law principles. In adopting an objective substantial-certainty test, we relied on Spivey v. Battaglia, 258 So. 2d 815 (Fla. 1972), which itself relied on the Restatement of Torts, for the proposition that " here a reasonable man would believe that a particular result was substantially certain to follow, he will be held in the eyes of the law as though he had intended it." Id. at 817 (first emphasis added). Based on this tort law principle, we held that an injury would not be considered "accidental," and an injured employee therefore could satisfy the intentional-tort exception, if his injury resulted from employer conduct that was objectively substantially certain to result in injury. Importantly, under this standard the employer need not have known that its conduct was substantially certain to cause injury; the fact that it should have known of the substantial certainty of injury would be sufficient to negate the "unexpectedness" or "unusualness" of any resulting injury, regardless of whether the injury truly was unexpected by the employer. Nothing in the insurance policy, however, suggests that the "by accident" coverage clause should be construed in this narrow sense.
In support of its argument that we should interpret the "by accident" coverage clause in accordance with our reasoning in Turner, Travelers points to our decision in State Farm Fire & Casualty Co. v. CTC Development Corp., 720 So. 2d 1072 (Fla. 1998). In CTC Development, we had to interpret the coverage clause of a building contractor's business liability insurance policy. The policy covered " hose sums that the insured becomes legally obligated to pay as damages because of . . . property damage . . . caused by an occurrence." Id. at 1073 (emphasis omitted). The policy defined "an occurrence" as " n accident."
Id. The case arose after CTC Development (CTC), the insured building contractor, was sued by the neighbors of the clients for whom it was building a house. The neighbors sued CTC for building the house in violation of restrictive covenants that required the house to be built at a fifteen-foot setback. CTC admitted that it knowingly built the house beyond the fifteen-foot setback but asserted that it did so only on the mistaken belief that its variance request had been approved.
The question in CTC Development was whether the d
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