Suicide and Life Insurance the assured’s assuming to have the right to so breach his contract that the other party to the agreement would be compelled to do that which he cannot, in any view of the case, be held to have contracted to do—at least, not allowed directly to contract to do——is stamped a wrong by the criminal as well as by the civil branch of our jurisprudence. If a debtor gave his creditor as security a policy of fire insurance on the debtor's house, and then set fire to the building, the creditor could not
collect.
Yet, as far as the sanctity
of “vested" goes, are the cases not identical, except with, possibly, a shade of difference in favor of the title of the beneficiary of the fire insurance policy, since life, more than property, is the object of the law's tenderest care? In the fire insurance case the assured loses because of his wrong in destroying his own property, which diminishes his own material wealth only; while in the case of his life insurance he is
allowed to cast material wealth upon another by his own wrongful act, which diminishes the power of the state to defend itself. Arson and suicide have both been crimes since a time so remote that the memory of man moves to no other condition of the law. It has ever been quite generally the policy of the law to give a stronger protection to life than to property. But it can hardly be said that the law throws more safeguards around life than around
property in insurance law while it allows payment of money to a person named by one who afterwards commits suicide, but denies any recompense to the assignee of one who thus destroys his property. The ease with which
life may be thus converted into money shows that it is more malleable than property in the crucible of wrong conduct, and stamps it as one of the
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less valuable things in the assaying department of human laws. As is stated by one of the able editors of Lawyers‘ Reports Annotated: "The right to recover on a policy of insurance in case of the suicide of the insured while sane should be made to depend upon the intent of the insured rather than upon the vested right of some third person in the policy, which will ordinarily be of an entirely fortuitous nature. or will be determined by the design of one in whose mind the possibility of suicide may have lurked, although it was not actually contemplated at the time of taking out the policy."
The United States Supreme Court has said that a policy which should state that the assured's beneficiary would be paid a certain amount if the assured committed suicide while sane would undoubtedly be void. If
persons cannot contract directly for one of them to do a certain thing, what reason has a court of justice to hold that a contract between those persons and silent as to the doing of that thing is to be construed as a contract that one of them must do that certain thing? In what other branch of the law will the courts, by construction, place upon
a person a liability which that person would not be allowed to expressly con tract to assume? What difference can there be in the moral influence on the assured between a policy which pro vided for payment if the assured should take his own life and one which is silent as to such payment while the assured knows
that
by
judicial
construction,
supreme in his case, the latter policy will be held to give his dependent ones the right to receive payment for his suicide? By a familiar maxim, older than the first insurance policy, one is not liable for the acts of God, but may contract to assume liability. Yet here we have an act of man, the results of which no liability can be expressly contracted for, yet if not so contracted for will be
