Court Opinion

ID: 9644307
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 20:52:40.426152+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:11:11.323967
License: Public Domain

HUTCHESON, Circuit Judge
(specially, concurring).
I agree with my associates that the decree should be reversed. I think that they have taken untenable ground. Conceding that the weight of authority supports the view that the incontestable clause requires contest in court, and that in an ordinary suit at law this defense must be made in the answer, it must be remembered as to this suit that it was not at law on the policy but in equity to compel restoration of reinstatement of policies alleged to have been canceled for fraud in procurement. Not only so, but there was a mass of testimony taken on this issue long before the two years was up. I believe the decisions already written on this matter of contest have pressed the clause in question to the verge of the extreme limits of a common sense view.
Our decision seems to me to go far beyond them. To say of a suit brought in equity to reinstate a policy canceled for fraud in which the petition declaring on the cancellation sets up the grounds of its doing and in which the parties take voluminous testimony is not a contest is in my opinion to say that what is so is not so.
I shall not extend these views, however, for I think the right result was reached. I am of the opinion that the evidence taken as a whole does not support the contest, does not admit of the *202rational conclusion that the reinstatement was secured by material misrepresentations.