Orient Insurance v. Daggs

Citations

• 172 U.S. 557
• 19 S. Ct. 281
• 43 L. Ed. 552
• 1899 U.S. LEXIS 2386

Syllabus

<p>The provision in section 5897'of c. 89, art. & of the Revised Statutes of Missouri, that “in all suits upon policies of insurance against loss or damage by fire, hereafter issued or renewed, the defendant shall not be permitted to deny that the property insured thereby was worth at the time of the issuing of the policy the full amount insured therein on said property; and in case of total loss of the property insured, the measure of damage shall be the amount for which the same was insured, less whatever depreciation in value below the amount for which the property is insured, the property may have sustained, between the time of, issuing the policy and the time of the loss, and the burden of proving such depreciation shall be upon the defendant; and in case of partial loss, the measure of damages shall be that portion of the value of the whole property insured, ascertained in the manner hereinafter described, which the part injured bears to the whole property insured; ” and the provision in section 5898 “that no condition of any policy of insurance contrary to the provisions of this article shall be legal or valid,” are not, when applied to a foreign insurance corporation insuring property within the State in conflict with the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, forbidding a State to make or enforce a law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, or to deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law; or to deny to any person within its jurisdiction, the equal protection of the laws.</p> <p>A corporation is not a citizen within the meaning of that Amendment, and hence has not the privileges and immunities secured to citizens against state legislation.</p> <p>That which a State may do with corporations of its own creation it may do with foreign corporations admitted into it.</p> <p>Hooper y. California, 155 U. S. 648, cited, approved and applied.</p>