Court Opinion

ID: 9832675
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-01 22:05:56.505952+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:43:50.043774
License: Public Domain

On Motion for Rehearing.
Appellant on motion for rehearing contends that the case of Johnson v. Farmers’ Insurance Company, 126 Iowa, 565, 102 N. W. 502, in effect qualifies or overrules Rundell v. Anchor Fire Insurance Company (Iowa) 101 N. W. 517, cited by this court. The appellant in her original brief cited the Johnson Case, which was examined by us upon the original hearing. The two cases cited were decided by the Supreme Court of that state, and the latter does not refer to the former. There are portions of the iron safe clause, such as keeping a set of books in a safe and the like, which, if breached and did not cause the fire, would be eliminated by the statute. This is substantially the holding in the latter case. In the former the policy had a warranty to the effect that after the fire the assured should produce the books for examination by the company. This last clause the court held was not affected by the statute. We therefore concluded there was no conflict in the two cases, and that the court did not intend to modify its former holding. We, of course, do not consider that we have written into the statute a provision not included in it. It is provided by the statute:
. “No breach * * ⅜ shall render void * * * unless such breach * * * contributed to bring about the destruction.”
A warranty which required the production of the books after the fire could not be breached before the fire. It seems to us the clear implication of the act is that it must be such a breach of a warranty before the fire which contributed to the loss, and which could have caused the loss that the Legislature had in mind. The very construction of the sentence implies when property is destroyed liability cannot be defeated unless a breach of the contract contributed to it. It occurs to us that to say that the act further intended to make all those warranties nugatory which were required to be performed after the fire, such as to prove up the loss, prevent false swearing, provisions for adjustment, and the like, is to interpret the act to mean that all the contract is permitted to stipulate was to pay the stated value in the policy without a right to demand proof or evidence of the real amount lost. We do not believe such purpose can be read into the act.
The motion will be overruled