Court Opinion

ID: 9853380
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 05:47:31.832931+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:22:46.479534
License: Public Domain

Caporale, J.,
concurring in part, and in part dissenting.
I concur in the judgment only; from the majority’s holding, I respectfully dissent.
It seems to me that the unstated premise on which the majority opinion rests is the general rule of contract law that absent anything to indicate a contrary intention, instruments executed at the same time, by the same parties, for the same purpose, and in the course of the same transaction are, in the eyes of the law, one instrument and will be read and construed together as if they were as much one in form as they are in substance. Properties Inv. Group v. Applied Communications, 242 Neb. 464, 495 N.W.2d 483 (1993).
I certainly agree that policies of insurance are contracts to be interpreted as are any other contracts. Design Data Corp. v. Maryland Cas. Co., 243 Neb. 945, 503 N.W.2d 552 (1993). Indeed, 2 George J. Couch, Cyclopedia of Insurance Law § 15:37 at 242 (rev. 2d ed. 1984) states:
Where two contracts, though separate in form, are both applied for and agreed upon at the same time as one transaction, they must be considered together for the purpose of determining the character of the transaction and *706the intention of the parties, and both instruments should be given effect where reasonably possible.
See, also, Balderama v. Western Cas. Life Ins. Co., 825 S.W.2d 432 (Tex. 1991) (separate insuring clauses, definitions, and provisions in separate policies not referring to each other construed together as one of them, being unnumbered and lacking schedule to which it referred, could not stand on own); Schreiber v. German-American Hail Ins. Co., 43 Minn. 367, 45 N.W. 708 (1890) (inconsistent descriptions of number of crop acres insured read out of each policy). But the rule does not apply when invoked by the drafter who was in a superior bargaining position, nor when there is no clear evidence that the parties intended the agreements to be read together. Berger v. U.S. Fidelity & Guar. Co., 834 F.2d 1154 (3d Cir. 1987).
The ambiguity in question here, whether there is coverage for inducing or contributing to the infringement of a patent, stems not from any indication that there might be confusion in Union Insurance Co.’s mind, as seemingly suggested by the majority, but from the fact that if there is a single contract consisting of both the primary, or “Comprehensive General Liability Insurance,” policy and the excess, or “Blanket Commercial Catastrophe Liability, ” policy, then the contract defines “advertising injury” differently in different places, one way in the primary policy and another way in the excess policy. The determination of whether there is an ambiguity in a contract is a question of law, the resolution of which depends not on what the insurer intended the words to mean, as the majority seemingly suggests, but on what a reasonable person in the position of the inshred would have understood them to mean. Decker v. Combined Ins. Co. of Am., 244 Neb. 281, 505 N.W.2d 719 (1993); Mahoney v. Union Pacific RR. Emp. Hosp. Assn., 238 Neb. 531, 471 N.W.2d 438 (1991).
The difficulty here is that while the record demonstrates that the two policies were issued at the same time, there is nothing from which I can infer that they were both applied for and agreed upon at the same time as part of one transaction and for the same purpose, nor that the parties intended them to be read together. These unresolved questions present genuine and material issues of fact, Properties Inv. Group, supra, making the *707grant of summary judgment to any party inappropriate, New Light Co. v. Wells Fargo Alarm Servs., ante p. 57, 525 N.W.2d 25 (1994).
Thus, I too would reverse and remand, but would do so not under a ruling that Union has a duty to defend, leaving for determination only the amount of the attorney fees due Land and Sky, Inc., but, rather, for trial on the issue of whether Union has a duty to defend.