Travis Luis Pantin has been named director of the Insurance Law Center at the UConn School of Law, also joining the faculty as an associate professor of law.

Pantin’s research concerns the doctrine, history and institutional practices of insurance. His forthcoming article, What Can’t Be Insured: The Policyholder’s Own Bad Acts, analyzes the insurance law principle that one cannot be indemnified against the results of one’s own moral turpitude. Pantin argues that insurance law articulates its own conception of individual responsibility that is distinct from but analogous to similar conceptions that courts use to assign legal liability in the tort or criminal law contexts.

After earning his BA from the University of Chicago, Pantin worked as a a macroeconomics and finance reporter in New York City and Abu Dhabi. More recently, he was an academic fellow at Columbia University Law School. He is a graduate of Yale Law School, where he was the articles editor for the Yale Law Journal.

The COVID-19 pandemic has unleashed a flood of lawsuits by businesses trying to force insurers to cover virus-related losses. Figuring out what that means to the insurance industry and their policyholders requires a massive data collection effort, which is now under way with the help of four UConn Law students.

The students gather information about state and federal court cases, turning lawsuits filed by a podiatry practice in Pennsylvania or a nightclub in California into data for the Covid Coverage Litigation Tracker. Professor Tom Baker at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School conceived and manages the tracker, which is co-sponsored by the Insurance Law Center at the UConn School of Law. His goal is to record the pandemic’s unique case law and provide the data that scholars, practitioners, and historians will need to analyze the litigation.

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