The Principles of Reinsurance Contract Law: an optional instrument of transnational reinsurance law

Abstract

The Principles of Reinsurance Contract Law (PRICL) Project is aimed at providing the reinsurance industry with uniform soft law rules governing reinsurance contract law, which parties may choose to apply to their contracts. The rules may be viewed as an optional instrument that will only apply when parties agree to ‘opt in’. With that in mind, the ideas underlying the PRICL can nevertheless be likened to those of the Restatements of the American Law Institute (ALI) in the USA. The ALI were founded ‘to promote the clarification and simplification of the law and its better adaptation to social needs, to secure the better administration of justice, and to encourage and carry on scholarly and scientific legal work’. It is the same aim, albeit at a transnational level, that is pursued in drafting the Principles of Reinsurance Contract Law.