Can earthquake insurance companies legally ask about &quot;Other Insurance&quot;? California Earthquake Authority. §8 on Other Insurance says a. If there is other insurance that covers earthquake loss to the dwelling or other property covered under this policy,we will pay our share of the covered loss or damage. Our share is the proportion that the applicable limit of insurance under this policy bears to the combined limits of insurance of all policies that cover the same property. This reduces the value of my insurance policy (but not its cost to me) only because I have another policy, potentially with a competitor. It seems to have no purpose other than monopolism. Can it be an antitrust violation? More competitive forms of insurance, such as life insurance, put options, credit default swaps, etc., do not have clauses of this sort. For example, a $1M life insurance policy does not lose value merely because you have a second one. And you can get as many as you like (for example, you get one with each new job, and you can generally keep it way past your time of employment). Obviously these life insurance companies, commodity derivatives, etc. companies can't write clauses like the CEA clause above -- they don't have monopolies and so they would go out of business if they did this. Is there anything legally non-monopolistic about the CEA clause quoted above? Specifically, would CEA be in violation of anti-trust law if they suspended a claim because I either declined to discuss &quot;Other Insurance&quot;, or because they found out about &quot;Other Insurance&quot; through some form of anti-competitive collusion?
Is there anything legally non-monopolistic about the CEA clause quoted above? Yes. The clause is not monopolistic at all, since it is not prohibiting you to purchase or retain policies from elsewhere. All it does is notify you about a limitation of CEA's liability to you in the event of losses covered by multiple insurance policies. Note that the clause is not in terms of &quot;other insurers&quot; or &quot;insurance providers&quot; but of &quot;other insurance&quot; (that is, regardless of there being one or multiple insurance providers involved). The clause addresses scenarios of coverage overlap, which has nothing to do with monopolistic practices. In fact, section 10089.26(b) of the California Insurance Code provides that Nothing in this section shall prohibit a participating or nonparticipating insurer from offering a condominium earthquake loss assessment policy for different amounts of coverage other than those offered by the authority. As explained above, the clause you reproduce is compatible with that provision. This reduces the value of my insurance policy (but not its cost to me) Some context is missing in your description, but you might want to inquire of the CEA about your premium on the basis of section 10089.26(a)(2): It is the intent of the Legislature, to the extent practicable, that rates charged by the authority to condominium loss assessment policyholders and residential property owner policyholders are treated equitably, and that a proportionate share of premiums is paid for potential exposure to loss, to the authority. Perhaps the CEA's reason for asking you about your other insurance policies is precisely to adjust/lower your premium. The clause you reproduce simply informs you that withholding that information in no event can result in you obtaining compensation that exceeds the loss you incurred. would CEA be in violation of anti-trust law if they suspended a claim because I either declined to discuss &quot;Other Insurance&quot;, or because they found out about &quot;Other Insurance&quot; through some form of anti-competitive collusion? No. The terms of your insurance policy might entitle the insurer to void the policy or deny coverage in the event of intentional misrepresentations. That would have nothing to do with anti-trust legislation, but with your breach of contract: your concealment of information that can be material to the insurer's assessment of risk. If you can prove that concealing your other insurance is not a material breach, or not a breach at all, then the insurer's denial of a legitimate claim would put the insurer in breach of contract (not of anti-trust laws).
I did some research and found the information below. It took me a while to figure out that the issue is known in German as &quot;Insichgeschäft&quot;. The quotes below are translations from Wikipedia. The term self-dealing is also used in Switzerland. It is regulated in Art. 32 ff. OR. The Federal Supreme Court has consistently ruled that self-contracting is fundamentally inadmissible because it “regularly leads to conflicts of interest and is therefore not covered by the company's purpose”. The contracting of the agent with himself should only be able to develop legal effects in exceptional cases, in particular if either the risk of the person represented being disadvantaged due to the nature of the legal transaction is excluded (e.g. &quot;purchase of goods with clearly defined market or stock exchange prices&quot;), or if the representative &quot;specifically authorizes the representative to conclude a contract with himself, which in certain circumstances can also be tacit or approve the transaction retrospectively&quot;. Now since I am the owner of the business and my company would get a free exclusive license, I assume that the above mentioned exceptional case is valid: However, the risk of discrimination (and thus also the obligation to obtain approval from a higher-level or subsidiary body) does not apply if there are no other shareholders in the AG in addition to the body that has concluded self-contracting. The Federal Supreme Court has rejected the additional requirement that, in addition to the absence of further shareholders, there must also be no corporate creditors. Sole shareholders are therefore free to enter into individual deals. Therefore, such a contract should be legally ok. Finally, to be considered: As part of the reform of the GmbH, the company law (Art. 718b OR), the GmbH law (Art. 814 Para. 4 OR) and the cooperative law (Art. 899a OR) introduced the requirement of written form for contracts that the representative of the company concludes with himself, with the exception of contracts which do not exceed CHF 1,000.
united-states Business Practices There are contracts where consumer deposits are required to be held in trust, requirements that mostly, but not entirely, arise under state law in the U.S. For example, many states require that landlords hold security deposits for residential rental properties in separate trust accounts, and almost all U.S. jurisdictions require that attorneys hold prepayment for legal services in trust for the consumer until the fees are earned. As another example, in Colorado, if a property owner make a payment to a general contractor for work on real property such as building or renovating a building, the general contractor is required to hold those funds in trust and not make payments to itself from those funds, until all subcontractors and material suppliers on the job have been paid in full and have no lien claims. In the same vein, many construction contracts, especially for governments acting as consumers, require contractors to be &quot;bonded and insured&quot; meaning that a third-party bond company is responsible for paying claims against the bonded company even if the bonded company is insolvent. It also isn't unusual in complex commercial transactions between sophisticated big businesses, for the parties to negotiate that certain funds related to a transaction be held in a bankruptcy remote trust, or that the work be done by a &quot;bankruptcy remote entity.&quot; But this is rarely the case when large numbers of consumers enter into small transactions with a big business. As @DaleM rightly notes, a business in a position to impose a contract of adhesion on consumers on a take it or leave it basis, can get away with it, and one simply might want to be wary about doing business with financially insecure businesses, if possible, even though financially secure businesses may charge more. A common theme is that consumers (maybe business to business or government to business) insist on trust-like or bond-like or insurance-like or collateral-like protections for deposits in transactions where the loss suffered if the security deposit was lost would be a major economic blow to the consumer in light of the consumer's overall financial situation. In contrast, these protections are foregone when the amount of a security deposit is small enough to be merely a survivable nuisance that may happen some small percentage of the time that the consumer engages in such transactions. This reflects an economic and policy judgment that the trouble of treating small consumer deposits as if they were trust funds isn't worth the transaction cost trouble of doing so. Priorities Under U.S. Bankruptcy Law In part to address the imbalance of power in this situation, claims to recover consumer deposits for unperformed goods or services owed by the debtor do have a priority under U.S. bankruptcy laws relative to general unsecured creditors of up to $1,800 per consumer. Specifically, these are seventh priority claims in bankruptcy pursuant to 11 U.S.C. ¶ 507(a)(7). They are behind claims secured by collateral to the extent of the value of the collateral (priority zero, so to speak), priority one alimony and child support claims, priority two costs of administering the estate, and priority three to six claims which include several kinds of claims that amount to up to about $20,000 of unpaid wages and benefits per employee and about $4,000 of unpaid amounts owed to farmers per farm for their crops. But security deposit claims are ahead of a variety of tax claims, FDIC claims, DUI personal injury claims, and general unsecured creditor claims. They are also ahead of the claims of stockholders. As a practical matter, when you are doing business with a business entity rather than a sole proprietor, there are no child support or alimony claims, and most businesses that have lots of transactions with retail consumers don't buy crops directly from farmers, so consumer deposit claims actually have a very high priority in bankruptcy and are usually repaid in full except in the very most catastrophic business collapses under U.S. law. So, while it isn't quite as good as holding those funds in trust, the bankruptcy priority comes close from the perspective of providing a practical benefit to every day small consumers doing business with large firms that go bankrupt. Canada Compared Superficially, at least, it appears that Canada does not have a similar priority for consumer security deposit claims in bankruptcy, although it could be that this arises in some back door manner invisible to practitioners unfamiliar with it under court interpretations of Section 70 of the Canadian Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act (BIA) which governs creditor priorities in bankruptcy in Canada. For example, the consumers may have an implied in law security interest in those funds of which I am not aware. It may also be that there are specific kinds of transaction in which deposits do have to be held in trust, just as there are in the U.S., even if that isn't true as a general rule. Finally, if one pays by credit card, it is often possible to reverse a charge like this one, pushing the risk of bankruptcy loss from the consumer buying with a credit card to the bank issuing the credit card, particularly if action is taken promptly.
An employee is an agent of the employer when working and owes a duty of loyalty to the employer. One of the obligations associated with a duty of loyalty is to refrain from receiving anything other than the employer authorized compensation for the work, rather than benefitting personally from work done on behalf of the employer. By appropriating additional benefit from the customer in a way that is unauthorized by the employer (the employer would be within its rights to sanction and authorize this conduct if desired), an employee who does not turn the profit in this transaction over to the employer has breached a fiduciary duty to the employer for which the employer would have a right to sue the employee for the amount by which the employee was unjustly enriched in the transaction. Would it actually play out this way in real life for these sums of money? Probably not. The stakes involved wouldn't justify the time and money of a lawsuit. But, breaching a fiduciary duty of loyalty to your employer in this context probably constitutes good cause to terminate the employment of the employee without paying severance that would otherwise be payable under Canadian employment law (in theory anyway, I've never seen a reported court case on point).
No Let's consider a similar scenario. If you made a beverage which poisoned a number of people, would you be absolved of liability because you gave it away for free? Of course not. As there is no contract between you, they would have to bring an action against you in the tort of negligence or negligent misstatement OR under consumer protection law. To succeed at tort they would need to prove that you owed them a duty of care; from Donoghue v Stevenson "You must take reasonable care to avoid acts or omissions which you can reasonable foresee would be likely to injure ... persons who are so closely and directly affected by my act that I ought reasonably have them in contemplation ...". Most cases will founder on your inability to foresee the use to which your software may be put. Consumer law is jurisdiction specific but they generally contain warranties that what you provide (gratis or otherwise) is fit for purpose, merchantable and that you do not make false and misleading statements. There is a chance that a case brought under this sort of law could succeed as you have not limited the purpose, specifically declared that it is not of merchantable quality and have (presumable) said what it does so that, if it doesn't do what you said, you have been misleading and deceptive.
Is there any legal doctrine whereby E's agreement with A continued to apply to E in his work for company N? No, because the parties to the non-compete agreement were Employee E and company A, not the human who owned and sold A. What about B? Do they have any standing to block E's going to work for a B's customer? No. My rationale is that the decisions you describe result in a waiver of the non-compete clause. An employment relation between B and E never existed. Thus, the only vestige of B's non-compete rights binding E that could have been preserved stem from E's former employment at A. However, that vestige disappeared at the instant B --apropos of the hospital project-- waived its non-compete clause with N. Given B's waiver with regard to N, N's failure to establish a non-compete clause with E enables the latter to conduct business with (or accept employment at) the hospital. If anything, B would have standing to sue N for negligence or related torts. But neither B nor N has any viable non-compete claims against E.
Did I lose possession of my goods? That seems unlikely. But enforcing it sounds complicated, at least from the standpoint of substantive law (the Code civil). I am not knowledgeable of French procedural law. The difficulty begins with identifying whether your claim is cognizable as unjust enrichment, or --per your subsequent oral agreement-- breach of contract. You might want to read sections "The French Law of Unjust Enrichment" and "Enrichissement sans Cause" in this post. Please note that the French Civil Code recently underwent significant reforms, whence references of its articles are likely outdated. Here I pointed out one example of statutory renumbering in the Code. In the second link, you will read that originally [...] the action in enrichissement sans cause would not be available to the claimant if he or she had any other cause of action, even if that cause of action was blocked for some reason. [...] [B]ut it is perhaps here that the law has relaxed most in recent cases. Thus, the subtleties of your matter can be decisive for identifying the type of claim that is applicable to your situation. Lastly, according to this treatise (on p.54), "[t]he French legal system does not have the principle of [reasonable] reliance as it exists in the American legal system" (brackets added). That makes it easier for a plaintiff to prove his claims under French law.
we would like to know whether we have sufficient legal grounds to sever/terminate/exit this contract with Superior Management Co.*, if the company does not mutually agree to do so. No. In that event the HOA is stuck with the contract at least for the remaining part of the current period. The HOA's concern that the provider could breach the contract by significantly underperforming seems speculative and does not entitle the HOA to breach it first. Changes in the name and/or ownership of a party does not alter the parties' rights and obligations pursuant to the contract. This implies that neither party is entitled to disavow his obligations by terminating the contract altogether. For early &amp; unilateral termination to be an option, it would have to be provided in the terms of the contract itself.