TATLA Newsletter – April 2020

One of the (very few) consolations of the present emergency has been the chance to catch up on the great television of years past. I have spent this week bingeing on the BBC’s 1994 adaptation of Middlemarch. My own advancing years have lent a new sympathy for Eliot’s Reverend Edward Casaubon (brilliantly played by Patrick Malahide in the tv series). The ageing Casaubon labours unceasingly at home on a scholarly work which aims to “… elucidate those elements which underpin every system of belief known to man.” This great project both diverts him from all other sources of earthly pleasure and (seemingly) never ends: welcome to lockdown.

In this edition of the Newsletter, our authors have concentrated on the great project of EU insurance jurisdiction in its many varieties. What links these recent contributions is the term “Matters relating to Insurance” where it appears in the sub-heading to section 3 of the recast Brussels I Regulation No 1215/2012. We can now add Cole, Hutchinson and Aspen Underwriting to the considered thoughts of the Court of Appeal in Keefe v Mapfre [2016] 1 WLR 905. Moreover, Cole and Hutchinson on the one hand and Aspen Underwriting on the other provide further content (respectively) to (i) the consumer contracts ground of jurisdiction (section 4 of recast Brussels I) and (ii) the treatment of exclusive jurisdiction clauses. Also hot off the press (if this were not excitement enough) is the recent CJEU decision – further expanding our understanding of the consumer contracts ground of jurisdiction – in AU v ReliantCo Investments Case C-500/2018 (2020), about which we will be briefing shortly.

So there you have it – not, perhaps, “The Key to all Mythologies” – but, instead, a reliable, readable and succinct guide to “those elements which underpin” our understanding of section 3 of recast Brussels I.

Read the TATLA Newsletter in full here: