0 0
United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit - 495 F.3d 191
The case involves property owners seeking recovery under their insurance policies for damage caused by Hurricane Katrina. The plaintiffs argue that the flood exclusions in their policies are ambiguous due to the negligent design, construction, and maintenance of the levees, and that their policies should be construed in their favor to effect coverage for their losses. However, the court concludes that the flood exclusions unambiguously preclude their recovery, even if the levees were negligently designed, constructed, or maintained. The court is bound to enforce the unambiguous terms of their insurance contracts as written under Louisiana law, and therefore, the plaintiffs are not entitled to recover under their policies. The Vanderbrook case ruled that the policies covered loss from water damage resulting from levee breaches caused by negligence. The Xavier University case granted partial summary judgment in favor of Xavier, ruling that the flood exclusion clause in their policy with Travelers did not exclude coverage for damage caused by ground water from the collapses of the 17th Street Canal and the London Avenue Canal levees due to man-made causes. The Chehardy case involves thirteen insurance companies, including the ISO Defendants, who used policy forms provided by Insurance Services Office, Inc. The plaintiffs allege that their all-risk insurance policies cover their losses resulting from the levee failures, which they believe are covered perils under their policies. They are seeking a declaratory judgment that their damages were caused by covered perils, including windstorm, acts of negligence, and storm surge. They are also bringing claims for breach of contract, breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing, and insurance bad faith under section 22:1220 of the Louisiana Revised Statutes.
LSD+ gives you access to over 50,000 case briefs, more than anyone else. Be the first to email us the website of a case brief product that offers you more case briefs and we'll give you a free year of LSD+.
Unlimited access. Read as much content as you want during your trial with no device limitations. Cancel any time during your trial and keep access for the full 14 days.
Lawyers and judges love to use big words. And Latin, for some reason.
Highlight a legal term in LSD Briefs and get an instant, plain English definition. Try highlighting contract or specific performance. No need to search or read through a list of definitions, simply highlight the words you don’t know and our LSDefine integration will instantly give you a definition to any of over 30,000 legal terms.
DeepDive allows you to explore legal cases like never before. DeepDive offers multiple levels of case summaries, which empowers you to quickly and easily find the information you need to stay on top of readings. Easily navigate through summary levels and click on any text to get more detail, all the way down to the original legal case text.
Our proprietary state-of-the-art system can instantly brief over 6,000,000 US cases. That means we can probably brief that case that your professor assigned last night when she sent you a poorly scanned pdf and told you to read every third paragraph. Or maybe she uploaded it to Canvas and didn’t really tell you to read it, but you know you probably should. Tenure does wild things to good people.
Study groups are a great way to learn and explore a case. LSD has chat rooms for each case to let you ask questions across the community and hear what other students struggled with and how they put it all together. Learn the key points of every case from other LSD+ users and share your knowledge with LSD High Points.
Don’t settle for mistakes in briefs that have been there for 10 years and never fixed. Find an issue or something missing from a brief? Down vote and we will make improvements. All of our case brief editors graduated from from T14 law schools.