Morton International, Inc. v. General Accident Insurance

The opinion of the Court was delivered by

STEIN, J.

This case concerns insurance coverage for environmental pollution. The events affecting the coverage claims before us span a period of several decades, in the course of which societal indifference concerning environmental-pollution damage has been supplanted by a heightened awareness of the need for environmentally-sound waste-disposal practices and an increasingly aggressive governmental effort to remediate the consequences of past environmental damage. That evolution understandably has influenced the insurance industry’s concern about its…