McNally v. Metropolitan Life Insurance

Citations

• 16 Pa. Super. 111
• 1901 Pa. Super. LEXIS 25

Syllabus

<p>Insurance — Life insurance — Beneficiary—Executor.</p> <p>Where a doubt in regard to whom life insurance money should be paid is of the insurance company’s creation, the application for insurance, with the policy, is to be construed most strongly against the insurer.</p> <p>A policy of life insurance is in the nature of a testament, and although not a testament it is, like the provisions of a will to be liberally construed in favor of the ones who may naturally be presumed to have been special objects of bounty. It is to be interpreted as the insured understood it, if all points of the contract taken together will admit of such construction.</p> <p>Where a dated application for life insurance designates a person named as sole beneficiary, and the undated policy provides that the “ production by the company of this policy and of a receipt for the sum assured, signed by any person, furnishing proof satisfactory to the company that he or she is the beneficiary or an executor .... of the assured, shall be conclusive evidence that such sum has been paid to and received by the person or persons lawfully entitled to the same,” the company is bound to pay the beneficiary named in the application, and it is immaterial that some of the premiums were paid by the husband of the assured, and that the policy was surrendered by him to the company as executor of the insured.</p>