Federal Judge Refuses to Certify Bad Faith Question to Ala. High Court

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — A federal judge has denied an insurer’s request to certify to the Alabama Supreme Court the question of whether the tort of bad faith is applicable to reinsurance disputes, ruling that certification “would be neither necessary nor appropriate.”

In an April 12 order, Judge Myron H. Thompson of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama said that when he previously held that the Alabama Supreme Court would not extend the tort of bad faith to the reinsurance context, he had “plenty of sources of state law on which to rely, including a number of …