Malone v. ReliaStar Life Insurance

KANNE, Circuit Judge.

This is a case about death. To be entitled to the death benefit payable under a life insurance policy, a beneficiary must prove that the insured is actually, or, in the alternative, perhaps only legally, dead. There is a difference between the two. As is often the case in the law, words and concepts so familiar in everyday life assume esoteric identities when cloaked in legal rhetoric. It should come as no surprise, then, that not even death, perhaps the most sobering and forthright fact in life, is immune from legal definition.

A life insurance beneficiary may prove an…