A Comparative Study on the Legal Aspect of the Duty of Disclosure in Korean Insurance and English Insurance Laws

우리 상법(보험편)과 영국 해상보험법의 고지의무 법리에 관한 비교 연구

In 25th April. 2008, the Korea legislature gave advance notice on the Revision Bill of Commercial Law in Insurance Division in partial, one of which is the principle of utmost good faith to be codified in accordance with the effectuation of the Revision Bill enforcement. For this, even though the disclosure duty is not included in the Revision Bill, it should also be discussed in relation to the principle of utmost good faith because it is based upon the principle of utmost good faith and forms a part of utmost good faith. In Marine Insurance industry in Korea, there are the sections and the clauses in relation to the English governing law included in the Policies and the Clauses used in Korea and, also, they still come into effect for the Korea Courts' judgements. So. we, Korea, should carefully pay attention to the trend of English courts' leading case, academic world and insurance industry on the disclosure duty in U.K. This study is thus based upon sections 17 and 18~20 of the Marine Insurance Act 1906 and sections 651, 652 and 655 of Commercial Law in Insurance Division, which appear throughout this work. The objective of this work is to analyse the duty of disclosure on Korean and English Insurance Laws including cases cited in this work, comparing the differences resulted from the analysis of the two countries‘laws and legal cases.