The Study On The Third Party’s Direct Claim In Liability Insurance

The liability insurance is a kind of property insurance of which the object is the liability to indemnities of the insured to the third party. The legislative objectives and function of modern liability insurance which reflects strong commonweal nature tends to center on fulfilling third party’s loss and safeguarding his legitimate interests. And the third party’s direct claim against insurers will deeply influence the achieving of the goal and value of this legal system."Insurance Law" has clearly defined the third party’s direct claim in liability insurance, but there are still many imperfect aspects. This paper try to study the third party’s direct claim based on its character, conditions of claiming, and plea from the insurer and then gives some legislative proposals. This paper is divided into five chapters:Chapter1mainly discusses the general theory of liability insurance, including the concepts and features of liability insurance, and points out the main feature of it.Chapter2focuses on the concept of the third party in liability insurance, his legal status, the concept and legislative trend of his direct claims. Then, it points out that the third party in liability insurance is neither the beneficiary nor the party of the contract, but the contract’s unique relevant person. The question of whether the third party have the right of direct claim has been affirmed by many countries in the world.Chapter3focuses on the character of the third party’s direct claim in liability insurance. By exploring the character, this chapter points out that we should adopt the legal rights theory to explain the character of compulsory liability insurance; and the character of random liability insurance can be explained by the right transformation theory. The different characters determine the difference between the two kinds of liability insurance.Chapter4Talks about the exercise of the third party’s direct claim and the plea from insurer, consider that the subject of exertion is the third party who suffered the accident within the coverage granted by the insurer. The exertion of direct claim needs three conditions:the insured is bankrupt, escape or delay in exercising his right; the liability is in the coverage granted by the insurer; the third party sues to court. But the direct claim is not unrestricted. The insurer can raise a plea based on any of the following issue:the insured is malicious; the insured has not completely fulfilled the contractual obligations, prepayment clause.Chapter5analyzes the shortcomings of the legislation of the third party’s direct claim, and then gives some legislative proposals on improving the third party’s direct claim in liability insurance by learning advanced legislative experience from foreign countries.