The Law of Indemnification and Its Interplay with Liability Insurance: A Fifty-State Survey

Indemnity is compensation given to make another whole from a loss already sustained. Contractual indemnity, on the other hand, is that which is voluntarily given as security or protection to prevent his or her suffering damage. But this contractually created indemnity has potential implications on another important form of contractual indemnity: the liability insurance policy. The ultimate question is whether the indemnity agreement is enforceable and what impact it has on the insurance obligation. While this is principally a survey of the intersection between general liability insurance and an insured’s separate agreement to indemnify, the discussion of relevant case law is not always limited to general liability policies where discussion and analysis of other coverage is relevant to the subject matter of this survey.