The Allocation of Environmental Investigation Costs between the Defense and Indemnity Obligations under General Liability Policies

For policyholders responding to administrative demands of federal or state environmental agencies, the allocation of environmental consultant costs between a carrier's defense and indemnity obligations is a frequent source of disagreement. Likely due to the fact-sensitive nature of such disagreements, existing case law lacks consistency in the analysis of such issues. This article analyzes different legal standards adopted by courts to analyze this issue. Although each court recognizes the fact-intensive nature of the inquiry, some courts are quite detailed in their analysis while others simply seek to achieve a sense of “rough justice.” As a result, attorneys involved in such disputes must have both an understanding of the specific legal standards employed by the courts as well as an understanding of the specific facts that may ultimately tip the scales.     

Seat biases of apportionment methods for proportional representation

In proportional representation systems, an important issue is whether a given apportionment method favors larger parties at the expense of smaller parties. For an arbitrary number of parties, ordered from largest to smallest by their vote counts, we calculate (apparently for the first time) the expected differences between the seat allocation and the ideal share of seats, separately for each party, as a function of district magnitude, with a particular emphasis on three traditional apportionment methods. These are (i) the quota method with residual fit by greatest remainders, associated with the names of Hamilton and Hare, (ii) the divisor method with standard rounding (Webster, Sainte-Laguë), and (iii) the divisor method with rounding down (Jefferson, Hondt). For the first two methods the seat bias of each party turns out to be practically zero, whence on average no party is advantaged or disadvantaged. On the contrary, the third method exhibits noticeable seat biases in favor of larger parties. The theoretical findings are confirmed via empirical data from the German State of Bavaria, the Swiss Canton Solothurn, and the US House of Representatives.