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C.P. v. Allstate Insurance Company3/3/2000
of the cause, causes, or combination of causes of the loss."
The district court correctly noted that there is " ersuasive but conflicting authority" in other jurisdictions regarding the effect of such policy language in context of injuries allegedly caused by both negligent acts and intentional or criminal acts. It also correctly noted that we have considered the effect of "multiple causation" in cases resolving insurance disputes, but not in a case involving a joint obligations clause. Finally, the court recognized that Allstate's policy contains no "severability of interest" clause that would clearly limit the effect of an exclusion to the person claiming coverage.
Allstate refers us to cases applying similar policy language and holding that innocent insureds are not covered in comparable circumstances. C.P. seeks to distinguish these cases. Some of these cases cannot be distinguished; they involve policy terms that are substantially identical to the terms of Allstate's policy here.
Our analysis here focuses on the policy's language and our case law. The district court has not referred us to any extrinsic evidence relevant to the contracting parties' expectations.
The exclusions do not resolve the question presented here: is there coverage for a loss claimed to have resulted from a combination of covered and uncovered conduct? Instead, they specify the types of injury to be excluded: injury resulting from criminal or intentional conduct. In doing so, they do not expressly exclude injury caused in part by both unintentional or non-criminal conduct. The terms can be interpreted broadly to exclude the resulting harm even if negligence was a contributing cause, or they can be read narrowly to apply only to injuries caused solely by intentional or criminal conduct. We must interpret exclusions narrowly. And our discussion above concerning coverage for an "accident" applies equally here. From the perspective of insureds whose acts are alleged to have negligently, but not criminally or intentionally, been a cause of a claimant's injury, these exclusions do not apply to the negligence claims against them. Likewise, with respect to C.P., the elder Lancasters' alleged conduct was allegedly negligent, and therefore neither intentional nor criminal. It thus triggered neither exclusion.
The broad exclusionary reading Allstate urges is permissible. But we conclude that reading the exclusions narrowly is more consistent with the insureds' reasonable expectations that they will be covered against claims that they negligently caused injury .
Worthington, which interpreted identical policy language, supports this conclusion. The court there declined Allstate's invitation to focus only on the intentional act or "underlying cause" of the complainant's injury . Instead, the court focused on the actual allegations of negligence against the nonacting insured and reasoned that this negligence constituted an "accident" under the policy terms and that the policy's intentional act exclusion was inapplicable to these claims.
We next consider the effect of Allstate's joint obligations clause. We assume for discussion's sake that Allstate is correct in asserting that this clause has the effect of attributing Harold's intentional and criminal conduct to the elder Lancasters. But, for two reasons, this attribution does not resolve the issue of whether the exclusions apply to the negligence claims against the elder Lancasters. First, it is not clear how the joint obligations clause even bears on the exclusionary language critical here. The pertinent language of the intentional act exclusion, Exclusion 1.a), seems to apply without regard to who has ac
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