Opinion ID: 146624
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 15

Heading: Actual Use

Text: The district court held that actual use of premises was a prerequisite to finding use of a piece of property to be in connection with a residence premises and explicitly rejected an interpretation of the term based on the insured's legal interest in or ownership of the off-residential location where the accident happened. See 512 F.Supp.2d at 127 (The legal right to use property may (or may not) be probative, but it is certainly not dispositive of whether parties actually use a piece of property `in connection with' their residence premises.). The district court reasoned that, with the exception of Uguccioni, courts considering the issue have required a showing of actual use. More basically, however, there is no Connecticut authority for the actual use approach taken by the district court hereit is an entirely open question whether there is any actual use standard at all in this context under Connecticut law, and even if there is, the bar for a showing of actual use may be lower than the bar set by the district court in this case. For purposes of the actual use inquiry, the court restricted its definition of the accident location to the northern portion of Midwood Road, despite acknowledging that Midwood Road is not `officially' divided into north and south. 512 F.Supp.2d at 125 n. 7. As the Kings uncontestably did not use the northern portion of Midwood Road for ingress and egress and had not alleged any other regular or repeated use of that specific area, the court concluded that the Kings had failed the actual use test. Yet, if the court had defined the accident location to be Midwood Road as a whole, as the Kings argue the court should have done, the Kings would have successfully shown actual use because they did regularly use the southern portion of that very same road for ingress and egress. And obviously, the northern portion of Midwood Road had been actually used, in the literal sense, by Junior at least on the day of the ATV accident. (Implicitly, though not expressly, the court determined that this one-time use did not rise to the level of actual use.) Consequently, in the absence of Connecticut precedent to guide us, we defer to the Connecticut Supreme Court to evaluate whether the district court's actual use analysis is supported by state law and, if not, to find that either a reformulation of it or one of the other approaches discussed above or, indeed, some other definitional structure should be used to construe this provision of a homeowner's policy regulated by Connecticut law.