Hawaii is a beautiful state. Like many mainland states, Hawaii requires insurers to act in good faith. If they fail to do so, those insurers can be held accountable for bad faith conduct.
In 1996, the Hawaii Supreme Court held the following in first party cases where policyholders are harmed by their own insurance companies:
Because: (1) there is case law in this jurisdiction, as well as various statutory provisions contemplating a cause of action for insurer bad faith; and (2) recognizing a bad faith cause of action would not contravene the legislative intent with respect to the remedies for insurer misconduct, we hold that Hawai‘i now recognizes a bad faith cause of action in the first-party insurance context.1
I finished a sailboat race from Los Angeles to Hawaii in the 50th Transpac this past week. The iconic boat I sailed was first to finish three times over the years and set a course record in 1977 that lasted for 20 years. The boat just happened to be named Merlin by its designer, Bill Lee.2 I was fortunate to purchase her in 2017. You can follow some of my adventures on Merlin at MerlinYachtRacing.com and on Facebook at Merlin Yacht Racing. The picture above is taken of me shortly after the finish of the race.
I will have a couple more blog posts about Hawaii insurance law before I leave. Merlin Law Group is a national law firm and we even have insurance dispute cases in this paradise.
Thought For The Day
Hawaii is paradise. It sounds cheesy to say it, but there’s music in the air there.
—Bruno Mars
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1 Best Place, Inc. v. Penn America Ins. Co., 82 Hawai’i 120, 127, 920 P.2d 334, 341 (Hawaii, 1996).
2 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Lee_(yacht_designer)
