Research On The Legal Issues Of Double Insurance

Double insurance, also called duplicated insurance in Taiwan, is opposite to the simple insurance that a proposer enters into multiple insurance contracts. As an act like that may cause the unjustified benefit of the insured, even lead to moral risk. Almost all the countries（regions） of the world, including China,place restrictions on the double insurance by changing the law. With this situation, the double insurance system comes into being and become an important part of insurance law. However, there had being many problems about the double insurance system of China, which results in a failure of meeting the need of this system. From the perspective of legislation of the whole world, most of the countries （regions）have the double insurance system, perfect of imperfect. Under the situation, an option of select the essence and discard the dross is necessary. From the perspective of the research on the double insurance in China, the debates on the specific rules in this system never stop and will go on for a long time. All the above makes this research on double insurance system has important significance in both theory and practice.Many scholars did lots of research before, deeply or shallowly, which can be references, more or less. On the basis of the former research and the legislation of double insurance around the world, this research analyses the problems of the double insurance system, then put forward questions, factors and solutions.This research is divided into six parts, discussing four problems. The main content can be showed as follows:The first part is the introduction of this research. It consists of the brief history of insurance, the origin of double insurance system, the significance of double insurance system in both theory and practice, and researching method of this essay.The second part focuses on the basic theory of double insurance system. There are both broad sense and narrow sense about the concept of double insurance, but the author agrees the narrow one, and thinks that the element of an excessive sum insurance should be necessary. The elements could be divided into obvious elements and recessive elements, of which the same insurance limitation should be recessive and need not to be written down.The third part aims at the question that double insurance could be applied to which kind of insurance. There are three theories about the scope of application of double insurance: only applied to property insurance, applied to all kind of insurance, applied to the insurance which has the characteristic of indemnity. The author takes the third one, because the basis of double insurance is the principle of loss compensation.The fourth part is about the notice obligation of the proposer or insured. The nature of the notice obligation is collateral obligation. The rules of the notice obligation could be improved from the aspects as follows: obligator, deadline, object, manner and contents. The insurance law of China fails to formulate the provision of legal liability of failing to make the notification, however, it should make itright. The legal liability of failing to make the notification should be a termination of the insurance contracts, not invalid contracts.The fifth part could be the most important part of this research. This part focuses on the effectiveness of double insurance. The double insurance can be divided into double insurance with good faith and double insurance with bad faith. Where double insurance has been obtained in good faith, a contribution principle is better, all the insurers should be contributories, the compensation should be calculated independently. Where double insurance has been obtained in bad faith, all the insurance contracts should be invalid for the purpose of punishing the proposer or the insured, and a distinction of the insurer’s mentality, with good faith or bad faith, is necessary too.The sixth part is the conclusion of this research. The core content of this part is to put forward comprehensive suggestion to the improvement of double insurance system of the PRC, absolutely on the basis of the summary and abstract of all the five parts above.