The Insurability of Suicide in Contemporary Law: Historical Evolution and its Projection in Comparative and Colombian Law

Abstract

The main purpose of the present work is, as its name reveals, to develop a panoramic and generalized study of suicide and its particular projection in the field of insurance law, a subject which, as the reader will be able to see, has an extensive and not entirely coincident historical trajectory, to which is added the complexity of this subject, in itself complex as is indeed the one concerning suicide, in which converge discursive lines of diverse.

This issue, for its part, has put the same logic to the test, both from the theoretical and legal perspective, as well as from the practical and functional perspective of the insurance contract, since suicide represents an event which, being inscribed within the framework of voluntariness, in theory would seem to escape the concept of 'insurable risk', but which, due to the disastrous consequences that an inclination in such a direction could entail for the beneficiaries, the experience has confirmed that both the insurance sector and the legislative and judicial sector, through various instruments and mechanisms, have opened up a new way of dealing with the risk in question, subject, of course, to certain requirements, which endorses the outstanding social function attributed to insurance.