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Byers v. Auto-Owners Insurance Co.11/21/2003
policy. It was undisputed that Stoker added Honl to the company policy as the driver of the vehicle in question. Stoker furnished Auto-Owners with Honl's personal information and stated that the van to be issued to him would be garaged in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and primarily driven within a one-hundred-mile radius of that location. Further, Honl had an Arkansas drivers' license and 80-90 percent of the time the van was driven in Arkansas.
Auto-Owners focuses on the entire insurance policy rather than the policy for the individual vehicle, and contends that the exception to Section 193 comes into play because the automobile insurance policy covered a fleet of vehicles which were mostly garaged in the state of Tennessee.
Following this argument and relying on Comment b of Section 193, Auto-Owners asserts that the exception to Section 193 is dispositive because the question involves the generic issue of entitlement to coverage, rather than the specific issue of the location of the insured risk.
Comment b to Section 193 provides:
The location of the insured risk will be given greater weight than any other single contact in determining the state of the applicable law provided that the risk can be located, at least principally, in a single state. Situations where this cannot be done and where the location of the risk has less significance, include . . . where the policy covers a group of risks that are scattered throughout two or more states.
Thus, Auto-Owners argues, that the exception indicates that the provision regarding the insured risk cannot be given greater weight because the policy covered cars located in two or more states and we must turn to the more general choice of law principles found in Section 188 to determine which individuals should be covered as insureds. Section 188 provides in part:
(1) The rights and duties of the parties with respect to an issue in contract are determined by the local law of the state which, with respect to that issue, has the most significant relationship to the transaction and the parties under the principles stated in Section 6.
(2) In the absence of an effective choice of law by the parties (see Section 187), the contacts to be taken into account in applying the principles of Section 6 to determine the law applicable to an issue include:
(a) the place of contracting,
(b) the place of negotiation of the contract,
(c) the place of performance,
(d) the location of the subject matter of the contract, and
(e) the domicil, residence, nationality, place of incorporation and place of business of the parties.
These contacts are to be evaluated according to their relative importance with respect to the particular issue.
Both parties cited Hartzler v. Am. Family Mut. Ins. Co. , 881 S.W.2d 653 (Mo. App. W.D. 1994) in their arguments regarding the applicability of Section 188 or Section 193 to liability insurance contracts. In Hartzler , the Missouri Court of Appeals for the Western District dealt directly with the question of an automobile insurance contract. After noting that the risk in question was garaged in the State of Kansas, the court applied Kansas law. Id. at 655. Thus, in Hartzler, the court found the principal location of the insured risk to be the most important factor to be considered in determining the applicable law. Id . When faced with the decision of whether to use Section 188 or Section 193 to analyze the conflicts issue, the court held that the law governing insurance contracts is to be determined in accordance with the general principles set forth in Section 188 only if "the p
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