Anti-concurrent causation clause
Wording that triggers an exclusion as soon as an excluded peril contributed to the loss, whatever the other causes and their sequence, thereby setting aside the search for the dominant cause.
When a loss results from several causes, one covered and one excluded, the law must choose. The traditional rule looks to the proximate or dominant cause: if it is covered, so is the loss. The anti-concurrent causation clause reverses that reasoning through its very wording: the loss is excluded if it results, directly or indirectly, from the excluded peril, regardless of any other cause or event contributing to the loss concurrently or in any sequence. It is therefore enough that the excluded peril contributed, even secondarily, for the exclusion to apply. This wording spread in war and terrorism exclusions after 2001, in flood and earth movement exclusions, then in cyber and communicable disease exclusions. It is formidable for the insured in complex losses, and its validity varies by jurisdiction: some US states deem it contrary to public policy when it sets aside the efficient cause. At the junction of cyber and political risk, it means that even partial state contribution to an attack may suffice to exclude a loss.
After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Mississippi homeowners whose houses had been destroyed by both wind, covered, and storm surge, excluded as flood, challenged the anti-concurrent causation clause in their policies. In 2007, the Fifth Circuit federal appeals court upheld it: damage to which water had contributed was excluded, even where wind had also contributed.
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