Professor Erik Knutsen has built an international reputation as a leading scholar in insurance law, tort, and civil litigation. His work helps courts and practitioners make sense of how insurance law applies to real-world situations – often at life’s most difficult moments.
He is co-author of several major Canadian and American legal texts, including Stempel and Knutsen on Insurance Coverage and Canadian Tort Law, and his scholarship is cited by appellate and trial courts across Canada, the United States, and Europe.
Knutsen continues to shape legal thinking through publications, invited lectures, and advisory roles with groups such as the American Law Institute. He is currently advancing a research agenda aimed at reforming how courts apply legal principles to interpret insurance policy language. Known for making complex legal puzzles understandable – and even gripping – he has earned multiple teaching awards, including the Queen’s University Chancellor Charles H. Baillie Award.
In this Q&A, Knutsen discusses the far-reaching role of insurance law, including how it connects with end-of-life and other issues.
What drew you to insurance law as an area of focus and what do you find most compelling about it?
Insurance law is fascinating because it is intertwined with people and their plights at often the worst times in their lives – loss, destruction, accidents and death. Yet at the same time there is a puzzle – does the particular insurance policy at issue provide coverage for the loss? If not, why? How does the language of the policy apply to strange scenarios in life? The stories that make up cases about insurance law are many times too wild to be believed – cases about an angry neighbour shoving a whirling lawnmower toward another neighbour’s face, or about a dentist who replaced a sedated patient’s teeth with fake boar’s tusks. Trying to figure out insurance law dictates insurance coverage results in cases like that often requires mental gymnastics and a bit of suspension of disbelief.
What key themes or issues do you explore in your current work?
I am currently finishing up a large project on trying to figure out better ways to apply insurance law to interpret insurance policy language to produce fairer, more consistent determinations of whether certain losses are covered or not by various insurance policies. Currently, Canadian courts take a very literalist, textualist approach to interpreting insurance policy terms. Sometimes, that makes for very unfair results that people could not predict. This is because words cannot be understood in a vacuum but need to be interpreted with an eye to the inherent risk-management purpose behind the words. This concept is currently lacking in the way we apply insurance law to insurance policy language to see if it applies in a given loss situation. But insurance is a product based on risk – it is odd not to ask “what is this particular insurance policy supposed to be doing as a risk-based product?”
How does insurance law intersect with end-of-life planning?
Issues of death invariably involve issues with insurance. There could be a life insurance policy payable on death. Someone may have died by accident and there may be an accidental death policy. Perhaps the death was someone else’s fault and so a person is sued. This triggers liability insurance. There is also disability insurance, travel medical insurance and critical illness insurance, all of which may come into play when someone is gravely ill or has died.
In some cases, those who are ill or dying may expect certain insurance coverage to be triggered. In cases where people have died, their surviving beneficiaries may be expecting an insurance payout. But neither type of insurance payment is automatic. Insurance law requires that certain conditions of the insurance coverage are met before a payout occurs. Someone may have lied on an insurance application, for example, when they first bought the policy. A lifelong smoker states they do not smoke. These types of misrepresentations void the policy, under the law. People may have pre-existing conditions that may exclude them from being covered under a particular insurance policy. Will a life insurance policy pay out if someone dies by suicide or by Medical Aid in Dying? All of these are legal issues that could come into play when end-of-life matters meet insurance law.
Why is it important for professionals in, for example, healthcare, to understand key principles of insurance law?
Insurance provides important financial peace of mind for people at often the worst times in their lives. Life insurance financially protects surviving beneficiaries if something happens to the family breadwinner. Travel medical insurance protects the traveller from potentially crushing out-of-country medical expenses. Long term disability insurance kicks in if someone is totally disabled from working. Yet each of these kinds of insurance is triggered by different conditions. Oftentimes, to determine if insurance is triggered and that important benefit is realized, the insurer relies on the information from healthcare professionals about things like cause of death, pre-existing health conditions, whether a death is an accident or the result of an underlying health condition, or whether a person is medically able to work. Understanding how insurance operates with end-of-life issues will help equip healthcare professionals to better understand the special roles they play in helping people in need trigger valuable insurance. It is equally important to understand what can go wrong, from a legal standpoint, when insurance issues arise at the end-of-life stage.
What other areas of a person's life are impacted by insurance law?
All aspects of modern life get impacted by insurance in one way or another. Insurance helps us buffer financial risks that life throws at us. We have to purchase mandatory automobile liability insurance in order to drive, in case we hurt someone while driving. If we want a mortgage, the bank will insist on homeowners’ property insurance. If anyone is injured as a result of someone else’s behaviour, liability insurance is triggered if the wrongdoer is sued. This could be for the failure of a manufactured product, medical malpractice, or a slip and fall. Businesses rely on commercial liability and property insurance in the event their business causes someone some harm, or their place of business or income stream is affected because the business’ property is damaged. And finally in today’s world of wild weather including ice storms, fires, and floods, property insurance is becoming key to helping people weather property losses to their homes and cottages.
Knutsen’s recent work includes a chapter in Insurability of Emerging Risks: Law, Theory and Practice (Hart Publishing, 2025), a forthcoming article in Supreme Court Law Review, and ongoing scholarship on real-world insurance interpretation in Canadian courts. He also serves on the editorial board of the Tort Trial and Insurance Practice Journal, the leading peer-reviewed journal of the American Bar Association in the field.
Professor Erik Knutsen will be teaching a session on insurance law in Queen’s Law’s End-of-Life Law Certificate, a four-day online program for professionals running June 2–5. Learn more and register on the End-of-Life Law Certificate program web page.
By Lisa Graham