Insurance & Reinsurance Law & Regulation – Jurisdictional comparisons

Insurance is about the spreading of risk. Ever since Lombard merchants introduced marine insurance in 1200 or Icelandic farmers formed themselves into a mutual later that century, the risk of one has been spread across many.

Of course, sharing risk among people exposed to the same peril does not always work. Accumulation of risk in one geographic area or some other similarly exposed grouping simply magnifies the problem. It was for this reason that reinsurance was born in the fourteenth century in order to allow greater diversification of security and of risk. Risks crossed frontiers, often on a reciprocal basis. A calamity in one place was resolved from the purses and pockets of strangers from far away.

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