Construction of the Contract of Insurance

The construction of the contract of insurance is a question of law. Traditionally, the process simply involved the ‘elucidation and application of a number of rules of construction.’ In the Commonwealth Caribbean, there is little to no evidence to affirm the abandonment of statutory aids and traditional canons of interpretation to the question of construction. Thus the question becomes what is the scope of that contract as dictated by those terms, that is as an internal exercise rather than a simple external one of applying traditional canons of construction. Construction of the contra proferentem rule requires words to be construed against the person drafting them, where they are ambiguous and capable of more than one meaning. However in the United Kingdom there has since been a significant restatement of the approach to the construction of the insurance contract and the principles of construction.