US SUPREME COURT REFUSES CALIFORNIA REGULATORS’ APPEAL

The US Supreme Court has refused to hear the California insurance department’s appeal against a federal appeals court’s ruling last March that the department must pay the $5m to $10m in legal fees that Generali, Gerling, the American Insurance Association and others amassed in fighting to overturn the state’s holocaust-era policy disclosure law. State lawmakers passed the Holocaust Victim Insurance Relief Act in 1999 to empower the state insurance department to revoke the licenses of local affiliates of European companies that failed to disclose information on holocaust-era policies. The carriers challenged the law, which the Supreme Court subsequently struck down as an infringement upon the federal government’s conduct of foreign policy. In fighting the fee award, the state insurance department had tried to argue that carriers were not entitled to fee reimbursement because they had failed to prevail in trial on their civil-rights challenge to the law.