Grip of the peril
An English insurance law rule under which property already seized by an insured peril, though not yet lost, is attached to the cover in force on the day the peril took hold.
Property can be gripped by a peril long before its loss is certain: a stranded ship that the storm will finish off, an aircraft held in a country that will eventually confiscate it. If cover expires or is canceled between the two dates, one must know which date counts. The grip of the peril rule, born of English marine law, holds that the loss is established on its own date but is attributed to the policy in force when the peril already held the property irresistibly. It prevents an insurer from escaping a claim by canceling while the loss ripens, and an insured from buying cover for property already doomed. The whole difficulty is dating the moment the outcome became inevitable, and that is a question of fact for the judge.
In the June 11, 2025 judgment on the leased aircraft left in Russia, [2025] EWHC 1430 (Comm), the London Commercial Court held the aircraft to have been detained from March 5, 2022 and lost on March 10, 2022, the date of Russian government resolution No. 311 banning their export: the date chosen decided which section and which period of cover had to respond.
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