Sanderson v. American Family Mutual Insurance Co.

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• recognizing that “resort to a judicial forum does not necessarily evince bad faith or unfair dealing, regardless of the outcome of the proceeding”
• stating that, where “an insurer maintains a mistaken belief that a claim is not compensable, it may still be within the scope of permissible challenge”
• noting that the adversarial nature of a lawsuit “may suspend the insurer’s obligation to negotiate as a reflection of good faith”
• stating that “[t]he reasonableness of the insurer’s conduct must be determined objectively”
• affirming summary judgment for the insurer as a matter of law because the insured failed to show that a reasonable jury could have found that the insurer acted in bad faith
• noting that, even under common law, finding that a claim was fairly debatable “is not a threshold inquiry that is outcome determinative as a matter of law, nor is it both the beginning and the end of the analysis in a bad faith case”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).