Insurer v. Insured

Donn Zaretsky of The Art Law Blog points us in the direction of an insurance case about which party, the insurer or the insured, should get a stolen artwork when it's recovered years after the insurer made a payment in the amount of the policy's limit. Since in this particular instance the valid and enforceable written agreement governing the relationship between the parties had a "plain and unambiguous" provision directly on point, the resolution of the dispute turned out to be a straightforward application of basic contract law principles. Now the really interesting question is in favor of whom would the Massachusetts court have ruled had there been no contractual provision determining who gets what in the unlikely situation that a stolen artwork paid for under an insurance policy is found decades later.