THE IDAHO SUPREME COURT REFUSES TO ENFORCE UIM POLICY ANTI-STACKING PROVISIONS

The Idaho Supreme Court in Gearhart v. Mutual of Enumclaw Ins. Co., 160 Idaho 666, 378 P.3d 454 (Idaho 2016), found that a UIM anti-stacking provision was ambiguous and, therefore, unenforceable. In Gearhart, the Court considered a UIM policy’s anti-stacking clause which stated that the maximum limit of liability under all of the policies that were issued was the highest applicable limit under any one policy. However, the Court found this clause to be ambiguous and, therefore, did not preclude a passenger from recovering the total cumulative UIM benefits under each policy issued to the insured’s parents. The majority opinion concluded that the anti-stacking clause in question was ambiguous because it could be construed to “mean that one aggregates all of the applicable policy limits and then the total of the limits constitutes the highest limit of any one policy.” The dissent characterized the majority’s conclusion as “nonsensical.” The dissent would have found the anti-stacking clause to be neither ambiguous nor complex.