Allstate Property & Casualty Insurance v. Squires

PRECEDENTIAL

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS

FOR THE THIRD CIRCUIT

______________

No. 11-1664

______________

ALLSTATE PROPERTY AND CASUALTY INSURANCE

COMPANY

v.

LARRY G. SQUIRES

Appellant

______________

On Appeal from the United States District Court

for the Western District of Pennsylvania

(D.C. Civ. No. 10-1458)

Honorable Joy Flowers Conti, District Judge

______________

Argued December 15, 2011

BEFORE: SLOVITER, VANASKIE, and GREENBERG,

Circuit Judges

(Filed: January 26, 2012)

______________

R. Sean O’Connell (argued)

James A. Godwin

Robb Leonard Mulvihill, LLP

500 Grant Street

23rd Floor, BNY Mellon Center

Pittsburgh, PA 15219

Attorneys for Appellee

Edward A. Shenderovich (argued)

Shenderovich, Shenderovich & Fishman

429 Fourth Avenue, Suite 1600

Pittsburgh, PA 15219

Attorneys for Appellant

______________

OPINION OF THE COURT

______________

GREENBERG, Circuit Judge.

I. INTRODUCTION

After Larry Squires was injured in a motor vehicle

accident, his automobile insurer Allstate Property and Casualty

Insurance Company (“Allstate”) filed an action in the District

Court seeking a declaratory judgment that it was not obligated to

pay uninsured motorist (“UM”) benefits to Squires under his

policy. Subsequently, in response to Allstate’s motion, the

Court granted it a judgment on the pleadings on March 2, 2011,

2

as it held that Squires’s injuries did not “arise out of ownership,

maintenance or use of an uninsured auto” as his policy required

for Allstate to be liable to him for UM benefits. For the

following reasons, we will reverse.

II. FACTS AND PROCEDURAL HISTORY

On October 20, 2008, Squires was driving his pickup

truck on State Highway 51 in Beaver County, Pennsylvania

when he was injured after swerving to avoid an approximately

two-foot square cardboard box lying in the middle of his lane.

The parties to this action are uncertain as to how the box came

to be left on the road but, for purposes of its motion in the

District Court, Allstate stipulated that an unidentified vehicle

dropped the box. 1 Following the accident, Allstate, after

rejecting Squires’s claim for UM benefits, filed this action and

Squires responded with counterclaims for breach of contract and

insurance bad faith under 42 Pa. Cons. Stat. Ann. § 8371 (West

2007). 2 Allstate then moved for judgment on the pleadings and

1

Squires has contended that another vehicle must have dropped

the box because at the time of the accident he was traveling on a

limited access highway with no adjacent sidewalks or other

means of pedestrian access.

2

Neither party contends that the matter in dispute should be

resolved by way of the arbitration procedure for resolution of

UM claims set forth in Squires’s policy. See app. at 48.

3

for dismissal of the counterclaims.

Squires’s policy provides, in relevant part:

[W]e [Allstate] will pay damages to an insured

person [Squires] for bodily injury which an

insured person is legally entitled to recover from

the owner or operator of an uninsured auto.

Bodily injury must be caused by accident and

arise out of the ownership, maintenance, or use of

an uninsured auto.

App. at 44. The policy’s language tracks the Pennsylvania

Motor Vehicle Financial Responsibility Law (“MVFRL”),

which requires that insurers offer UM benefits in motor vehicle

liability insurance policies. 3 The MVFRL provides for

3

75 Pa. Cons. Stat. Ann. § 1731(a) (West 2006) provides:

(a) Mandatory offering.—No motor vehicle

liability insurance policy shall be delivered or

issued for delivery in this Commonwealth, with

respect to any motor vehicle registered or

principally garaged in this Commonwealth, unless

uninsured motorist and underinsured motorist

coverages are offered therein or supplemental

thereto in amounts as provided in [75 Pa. Cons.

Stat. Ann.] section 1734 (relating to request for

lower limits of coverage). Purchase of uninsured

motorist and underinsured motorist coverages is

optional.

4

“uninsured motorist coverage” as follows:

Uninsured motorist coverage shall provide

protection for persons who suffer injury arising

out of the maintenance or use of a motor vehicle

and are legally entitled to recover damages

therefor from owners or operators of uninsured

motor vehicles.

75 Pa. Cons. Stat. Ann. § 1731(b) (West 2006). The MVFRL

defines “uninsured motor vehicle” to include, inter alia:

An unidentified motor vehicle that causes an

accident resulting in injury provided the accident

is reported to the police or proper governmental

authority and the claimant notifies his insurer

within 30 days, or as soon as practicable

thereafter, that the claimant or his legal

representative has a legal action arising out of the

accident.

Id. § 1702.

Although Squires’s insurance policy -- unlike the

MVFRL-- does not include unidentified motor vehicles in its

definition of “uninsured auto,” see app. at 45, Allstate did not

dispute -- and the District Court, quite reasonably in view of

section 1702, assumed -- that the unidentified vehicle was an

“uninsured motor vehicle” for purposes of the Court’s coverage

5

analysis. 4 Accordingly, the sole issue that the Court decided

was “whether an accident caused by a box which fell from an

uninsured motor vehicle can be attributed, as a matter of law, to

the ‘ownership, maintenance or use’ of an automobile.” App. at

5. The Court answered this question in the negative, concluding

that there is UM coverage for policies containing the “arising

out of” language only when a vehicle -- and not some other

object such as the box -- was “the instrumentality causing . . .

the [a]ccident.” App. at 11. Accordingly, on March 2, 2011, the

Court granted Allstate’s motion for judgment on the pleadings,

denied its motion to dismiss the counterclaims as moot, and

dismissed Squires’s counterclaims as moot. Squires timely

appealed.

4

Though the District Court did not directly address the question

of whether the policy’s language or the MVFRL controlled its

coverage analysis, in Pennsylvania “[i]nsurance contracts are

presumed to have been made with reference to substantive law,

including applicable statutes in force, and such laws enter into

and form a part of the contractual obligation as if actually

incorporated into the contract.” Clairton City Sch. Dist. v.

Mary, 541 A.2d 849, 851 (Pa. Commw. Ct. 1988) (citing First

Nat’l Bank of Pa. v. Flanagan, 528 A.2d 134 (Pa. 1987)).

Accordingly, we refer to both Squires’s policy and the MVFRL

in resolving this case.

6

III. JURISDICTION AND STANDARD OF

REVIEW

The District Court had diversity of citizenship subject

matter jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1332. 5 We have

jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1291. We exercise plenary

review over the District Court’s grant of Allstate’s motion for

judgment on the pleadings under Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(c). See

Ehrheart v. Verizon Wireless, 609 F.3d 590, 593 n.2 (3d Cir.

2010). A court will grant a motion for judgment on the

pleadings if the movant establishes that “there are no issues of

material fact, and that he is entitled to judgment as a matter of

law.” Sikirica v. Nationwide Ins. Co., 416 F.3d 214, 220 (3d

Cir. 2005) (citing Soc’y Hill Civic Ass’n v. Harris, 632 F.2d

1045, 1054 (3d Cir. 1980)). In considering a motion for

judgment on the pleadings, a court must accept all of the

allegations in the pleadings of the party against whom the

motion is addressed as true and draw all reasonable inferences in

favor of the non-moving party. See Allah v. Al-Hafeez, 226

F.3d 247, 249 (3d Cir. 2000).

5

At oral argument, Squires’s counsel tentatively represented

that the limit of Squires’s UM coverage was $50,000, a

possibility that led us to question whether the District Court had

diversity jurisdiction as it appeared that the case might not

satisfy section 1332’s requirement that the amount in

controversy exceed $75,000. However, after oral argument

counsel for the parties advised us that Squires’s insurance policy

had a UM coverage limit exceeding $75,000.

7

IV. DISCUSSION

The parties agree that Pennsylvania law governs our

interpretation of Squires’s policy and thus the extent to which it

provides coverage, and therefore we apply Pennsylvania law on

this appeal. Under Pennsylvania law,

the interpretation of a contract of insurance is a

matter of law for the courts to decide. In

interpreting an insurance contract, we must

ascertain the intent of the parties as manifested by

the language of the written agreement. When the

policy language is clear and unambiguous, we

will give effect to the language of the contract.

Paylor v. Hartford Ins. Co., 640 A.2d 1234, 1235

(Pa. 1994). However, where the policy language

is ambiguous, it “is to be construed in favor of the

insured and against the insurer, the drafter of the

agreement.” Dorohovich v. W. Am. Ins. Co., 589

A.2d 252, 256 (Pa. Super. Ct. 1991). In an

insurance policy, “[w]ords of common usage . . .

are to be construed in their natural, plain, and

ordinary sense . . . and we may inform our

understanding of these terms by considering their

dictionary definitions.” Madison Constr. Co. v.

Harleysville Mut. Ins. Co., 735 A.2d 100, 108

(Pa. 1999) (citations omitted).

As the District Court recognized, the sole question in this

case is whether under the policy and Pennsylvania law Squires’s

8

accident should be regarded as having “[arisen] out of

ownership, maintenance, or use of an uninsured auto.” We note

that to the extent “the state’s highest court has not addressed the

precise question presented, we must predict how [that] court

would resolve the issue.” Wayne Moving & Storage of N.J., Inc.

v. Sch. Dist. of Phila., 625 F.3d 148, 154 (3d Cir. 2010)

(alterations and citations omitted). In doing so,

we must look to decisions of state intermediate

appellate courts, of federal courts interpreting that

state’s law, and of other state supreme courts that

have addressed the issue, as well as to analogous

decisions, considered dicta, scholarly works, and

any other reliable data tending convincingly to

show how the highest court in the state would

decide the issue at hand.

Meyer v. CUNA Mut. Ins. Soc’y, 648 F.3d 154, 164 (3d Cir.

2011) (internal quotation marks and citations omitted).

“Although not dispositive, decisions of state intermediate

appellate courts should be accorded significant weight in the

absence of an indication that the highest state court would rule

otherwise.” Orson, Inc. v. Miramax Film Corp., 79 F.3d 1358,

1373 n.15 (3d Cir. 1996). Although Pennsylvania’s

intermediate appellate courts have not addressed a factual

scenario similar to that presented here, their decisions provide

significant guidance for us in answering the question that we

address. 6

6

The cases we cite show that the question of whether an

accident arose out of the “ownership, maintenance, or use” of a

9

We start, however, with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court

case of Manufacturers Casualty Insurance Co. v. Goodville

Mutual Casualty Co., 170 A.2d 571 (Pa. 1961), in which that

court held that “[c]onstrued strictly against the insurer, ‘arising

out of’ [in an insurance policy] means causally connected with,

not proximately caused by. ‘But for’ causation, i.e. a cause and

result relationship, is enough to satisfy this provision of the

policy.” Id. at 573. This formulation of “arising out of” is now

well-settled in Pennsylvania, and has been applied in various

insurance law settings, both when interpreting insurance policies

and assessing issues arising by operation of statutes, even

though some of the cases applying the formulation do not cite

Goodville. See, e.g., Tuscarora Wayne Mut. Ins. Co. v.

Kadlubosky, 889 A.2d 557, 563 (Pa. Super. Ct. 2005) (assessing

a commercial general liability insurance policy); Roman Mosaic

& Tile v. Aetna Cas. and Sur. Co., 704 A.2d 665, 669 (Pa.

Super. Ct. 1997) (same); Smith v. United Servs. Auto. Ass’n,

572 A.2d 785, 787 (Pa. Super Ct. 1990) (applying the Goodville

formulation to an uninsured motorist policy provision); Erie Ins.

Exch. v. Eisenhuth, 451 A.2d 1024, 1025 (Pa. Super. Ct. 1982)

(no-fault automobile insurance policy). Accordingly, Squires at

this time only need have alleged adequately that the unidentified

vehicle’s use was a but-for cause of his injuries. 7

motor vehicle come from numerous different factual situations

and thus inevitably will be factually distinguishable.

7

We are not implying that in order to recover on his UM

coverage Squires will not be required ultimately to show that an

uninsured vehicle proximately caused the accident. But at this

10

In making our analysis we are aware that Pennsylvania

intermediate appellate courts quite broadly have indicated that if

injuries are caused by “an instrumentality or external force other

than the motor vehicle itself,” the vehicle will not be regarded as

having contributed to the cause of the injuries pursuant to the

“arising out of” language. See Lucas-Raso v. Am. Mfrs. Ins.

Co., 657 A.2d 1, 3 (Pa. Super. Ct. 1995). For example, in

Lucas-Raso the Superior Court of Pennsylvania held in a

workers’ compensation subrogation action that an employee’s

injuries did not arise from the maintenance or use of a motor

vehicle when the employee slipped in a snow-covered pothole as

she was approaching her car. Accordingly, a provision of the

MVFRL, 75 Pa. Cons. Stat. Ann. § 1720 (West 2006), that bars

subrogation claims in cases “arising out of the maintenance or

use of a motor vehicle” did not preclude the workers’

compensation insurance carrier that had paid benefits to the

employee from subrogating to the recovery on the employee’s

third-party claims for damages arising from the fall. Id. at 5.

The court acknowledged that while the employee was “vehicle-

oriented at the time of her fall, she has failed to establish the

necessary nexus between her injury and the use of the . . .

vehicle,” observing that the employee had “offered no

connection to link her fall to the use of her vehicle other than

her claim that she was en route to enter it. The facts illustrate

that it was not the act of entering her vehicle which caused [the]

fall, and there was no other vehicle involved to break the chain

of entry.” Id.

stage of this case he only need satisfy the requirement to plead

facts that could support a conclusion that the unidentified

vehicle was a but-for cause of the accident.

11

The Superior Court employed reasoning similar to that of

Lucas-Raso in Smith v. United Services Automobile Ass’n, 572

A.2d 785, a case on which the District Court in this case heavily

relied. In Smith a boy was riding his bicycle on a road as a

tractor pulling a hay wagon passed by him. As the vehicles were

passing, a boy riding in the wagon threw hay in the bicycle

rider’s face, causing him to crash into a tree and suffer serious

injuries. Smith and his parents sued their automobile liability

insurer seeking uninsured motorist coverage, but the court held

that the injuries were not caused by a vehicle, but rather by the

“intentional act of a third party, [i.e.] the passenger, throwing

hay.” 8 Id. at 787. Accordingly, the court held that “[b]ecause

we are unable to discern any causal connection between the

vehicle and the injury, the injury cannot be said to arise from the

ownership, maintenance, or use of the vehicle,” and therefore

the plaintiffs were not entitled to uninsured motorist benefits

under their policy. Id.

Relying on Smith, the District Court rejected Squires’s

claim for coverage as it concluded that “the determinative fact is

that the instrumentality causing the Underlying Accident was a

box -- not a vehicle.” 9 App. at 11. We think, however, that

Smith is distinguishable from this case, and, when faced with a

set of facts similar to those here, the Pennsylvania Supreme

Court would hold that Squires’s accident arose “out of the

8

During the time that the hay wagon was on the road it was

regarded as an uninsured vehicle.

9

The District Court also cited two not precedential opinions but

we do not discuss them as we afford them no weight.

12

ownership, maintenance, or use of an uninsured auto.” As

Squires points out, Smith concerned the intentional intervening

act of a third party: a person throwing hay from the back of a

vehicle. Hence, in line with Goodville’s emphasis on causation

in fact, the Smith court held that “it is clear that the injury was

not caused by the vehicle, but by the boy intentionally throwing

hay in Smith’s face.” Smith, 572 A.2d at 787. The court noted

that it had “interpreted the phrase ‘maintenance and use of a

motor vehicle’ to mean the ‘maintenance or use of a motor

vehicle as a vehicle, including, incident to its maintenance or

use as a vehicle, occupying, entering into, or alighting from

it[.]” Id. (quoting Camacho v. Nationwide Ins. Co., 460 A.2d

353, 354 (Pa. Super. Ct. 1983)) (emphasis in original). In

Squires’s case, in contrast to the incidental involvement of the

vehicle in the boy’s injury in Smith, we will infer that the

unidentified vehicle directly was involved in the accident as it

was transporting the box as cargo -- a common use for many

types of vehicles traveling on a roadway. See 75 Pa. Cons. Stat.

Ann. § 102 (West 2006) (Motor Vehicle Code definitions

section defining “vehicle” as “[e]very device in, upon or by

which any person or property is or may be transported . . . .”)

(emphasis added). Thus, when the unidentified vehicle dropped

the cardboard box, it had more than an “incidental involvement .

. . in the situation that gave rise to [Squires’s] injuries.” See

Alvarino v. Allstate Ins. Co., 537 A.2d 18, 21 (Pa. Super. Ct.

1988). 10 Rather, the accident was a direct consequence of the

10

Squires’s case would have been indistinguishable from Smith

if in Smith the hay had been insufficiently secured while being

transported and consequently flew off the wagon and hit the

bicycle rider. In that situation the nexus between the “use” of

13

use of the vehicle for its intended purpose, for as is sometimes

said in another context, things “fall off the truck.”

We have examined the four cases on which Smith

principally relied but find them to be easily distinguishable from

this case as they all concerned intervening actions in situations

in which the injuries sustained were not attributable to common

uses of a vehicle. See Roach v. Port Auth. of Allegheny Cnty.,

550 A.2d 1346, 1350 (Pa. Super. Ct. 1988) (holding that a bus

passenger who was injured as a result of a fight between two

other passengers did not “establish the requisite causal

connection between the ‘maintenance and use of a motor

vehicle’ and the injuries”); Alvarino, 537 A.2d at 21 (holding

that a passenger who was bitten by a dog chained inside a van

did not suffer injuries arising out of the maintenance or use of a

motor vehicle, because the motor vehicle was merely “the place

where injuries [were] sustained”); Camacho, 460 A.2d at 354

(holding that injuries sustained by driver sitting in car caused by

an explosive device that was thrown from another vehicle did

not arise out of the use of the other vehicle); Schweitzer v.

Aetna Life and Cas. Co., 452 A.2d 735, 738-39 (Pa. Super. Ct.

1982) (denying coverage for a claimant who was pulled from

her vehicle and assaulted, because neither she nor her assailant

was “acting in the role of motorist,” and “an assault by an armed

assailant upon the driver of a car [is not] the type of conduct that

is reasonably identifiable with the use of a car”) (internal

quotation marks and citation omitted); see also Ohio Cas. Grp.

of Ins. Cos. v. Bakaric, 513 A.2d 462, 465 (Pa. Super. Ct. 1986)

the wagon and the accident would have been much stronger than

it actually was in Smith.

14

(refusing to interpret an incident where a husband shot his wife

in the face in the front seat of a car as one arising from the use

of a motor vehicle); Eisenhuth, 451 A.2d at 1025 (holding that

injuries suffered by a vehicle passenger as the result of a

gunshot did not satisfy Goodville’s causation-based standard for

“arising out of”); Day v. State Farm Mut. Ins. Co., 396 A.2d 3,

5 (Pa. Super. Ct. 1978) (holding that injuries sustained in a post-

collision fistfight between two drivers did not arise out of the

ownership, maintenance, or use of a vehicle for purposes of

assessing uninsured motorist coverage).

In support of its position, Allstate points to our decision

in U.S. Underwriters Insurance Co. v. Liberty Mutual Insurance

Co., 80 F.3d 90 (3d Cir. 1996). In U.S. Underwriters, Robert

Hipl parked his car at a nursing home in preparation for a

business meeting. As he exited his vehicle, Hipl slipped on

grease that had come from the nursing home’s kitchen and then

coated a section of the parking lot. Id. at 92. In the process, he

struck his back on the car’s door and was injured. Id. After

Hipl’s employer’s workers’ compensation carrier paid him

benefits, it asserted that it had acquired a subrogation lien on the

proceeds of a third-party action Hipl brought against the nursing

home and other defendants. Id. Following the settlement of the

third-party action, the third-party defendants’ insurers sought to

invalidate the lien under the provision of the MVFRL involved

in Lucas-Raso that bars a workers’ compensation insurer’s right

of subrogation to recover benefits from an insured’s tort

recovery if the injuries “arose from the maintenance or use of a

motor vehicle.” Id. We applied Goodville’s “but-for”

formulation of “arising out of,” but, noting that “every incidental

factor that arguably contributes to an accident is not a ‘but for’

15

cause in the legal sense,” see Berry v. Sugar Notch Borough, 43

A. 240, 240 (Pa. 1899), we cited Smith and several similar

intermediate appellate court cases and concluded that a

Pennsylvania court would not hold that Hipl’s injuries “arose

out of” the use of his car based on the particular facts of the

case. Id. at 94-95.

U.S. Underwriters clearly is distinguishable from this

case. We first observe that while, as here, something physically

external to a vehicle caused the injuries in U.S. Underwriters as

the grease that directly caused Hipl to fall emanated from a

nearby building, the procedural posture of our case requires us

to consider that the cardboard box that caused the accident was

dropped on the road by an unidentified and thus uninsured

vehicle. Consequently, there is a stronger factual causal

connection here between the injuries sustained and the

“ownership, maintenance, or use” of an automobile than the

connection between the injuries and the vehicle in U.S.

Underwriters. In U.S. Underwriters we recognized how

attenuated the causal connection was between the injury and the

vehicle for in reaching our result we relied on the analogous

case of Lucas-Raso, which reasoned:

Presently, appellant, who intended to enter her

automobile, claims she stumbled after stepping

into a snow-covered pothole and was injured as a

result. She has failed to show how her vehicle

contributed to her fall. Clearly, if appellant had

encountered the same snow-covered pothole in a

different location in the parking lot, this case

would not be before us. Appellant has offered no

16

connection to link her fall to the use of her vehicle

other than her claim that she was en route to enter

it. The facts illustrate that it was not the act of

entering her vehicle which caused appellant’s fall,

and there was no other vehicle involved to break

the chain of entry.

Lucas-Raso, 657 A.2d at 5. Although Hipl, unlike the injured

party in Lucas-Raso, struck his vehicle rather than the ground

when he fell, a vehicle did not cause the fall. Thus, though the

vehicle involved in U.S. Underwriters was the situs of the

injury, its presence was not instrumental in the fall.

Significantly, in U.S. Underwriters we examined “Pennsylvania

cases demontrat[ing] that the Commonwealth’s understanding of

‘use of a motor vehicle’ . . . will not encompass the causal nexus

at issue here,” 80 F.3d at 94, citing Smith, Roach, Alvarino,

Camacho, Schweitzer, and Eisenhuth, which as we have

mentioned were all cases where the presence of a vehicle was

merely incidental to the conditions that caused the injuries at

issue. See id. at 94-95.

As the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania set forth in

Goodville, the central inquiry in assessing whether an incident

“arose out of the maintenance, ownership, or use” of a motor

vehicle concerns causation, which is informed by -- but does not

necessarily turn on -- the “instrumentality” directly causing the

accident. Thus, the Pennsylvania intermediate appellate court

decisions that have indicated that if “an instrumentality or

external force other than the motor vehicle itself” caused the

accident the vehicle will not be regarded as having contributed

to its cause may not have precisely applied the Goodville

17

formulation. In fact, we think that while the identification of the

object that directly caused an accident surely is relevant in a

causation analysis, it is not dispositive and does not foreclose

the possibility that the accident arose out of the use of a motor

vehicle. In this regard, we point out that there may be two or

even more causes of an accident. Lehrer/McGovern v. Workers’

Compensation Appeal Board, 720 A.2d 853 (Pa. Commw. Ct.

1998), is an example of a case in which there was a confluence

of an external object and a vehicle that caused an accident. In

that case a construction worker was injured when a metal refuse

container slid off of a nearby flatbed truck and traveled about

ten feet before hitting a large steel box that struck the worker.

Id. at 853-54. The worker filed a third-party action against the

truck owner, and after the parties settled that action, his

employer, who had paid its employee workers’ compensation

benefits, filed a subrogation action seeking to make a recovery

from the employee’s proceeds from the third-party action. Id. at

854. However, as we already have noted in our discussions of

Lucas-Raso and U.S. Underwriters, a provision of the MVFRL

precludes an employer or insurance company that has paid

workers’ compensation benefits from subrogating to the

recovery from a third-party action “arising out of the

maintenance or use of a motor vehicle.” In affirming the

Workers’ Compensation Appeal Board, which rejected the

employer’s claim, the Commonwealth Court held that the

worker’s injuries arose from the maintenance or use of a motor

vehicle, and barred the employer from subrogating to the

recovery in the third-party action, despite the circumstance as

germane here that an object other than the vehicle itself struck

the worker. Id. at 856.

18

In a case similar to Lehrer/McGovern insofar as that case

involves an issue comparable to the issue here, the court in Fox

v. State Automobile Mutual Insurance Co., 461 A.2d 299 (Pa.

Super. Ct. 1983), faced a situation involving a plaintiff who was

injured after tripping over debris left when a car suddenly

crashed into her living room. In deciding that the plaintiff

qualified as a “victim” under an insurance policy issued

pursuant to the Pennsylvania No-fault Motor Vehicle Insurance

Act, the court determined that the causal connection between the

vehicle and the plaintiff’s injuries was strong enough to support

a conclusion that the accident “arose out of” the maintenance

and use of the vehicle. Id. at 302. Lehrer/McGovern and Fox,

cases that in our view describe cause-and-result relationships

which, if anything, were more attenuated than the causal

connection between the use of a vehicle and the accident here,

demonstrate that physical contact with an uninsured vehicle is

not required for an accident to “arise out of” the use of an

uninsured vehicle, and that, depending on the facts of the case,

some less direct causal relationship sometimes will suffice.

Accepting for purposes of this appeal that the unidentified

vehicle that dropped the box on the highway was an “uninsured”

vehicle, there is a sufficient causal connection for us to

determine that Squires’s injuries “arose out of” the use of a

vehicle under his insurance policy.

We finally note that “the MVFRL is to be liberally

construed in order to afford the greatest possible coverage to

injured claimants” and “[i]n close or doubtful insurance cases, a

court should resolve the meaning of insurance policy provisions

or legislative intent in favor of coverage for the insured.”

Houston v. SEPTA, 19 A.3d 6, 14 (Pa. Commw. Ct. 2011)

19

(citing 1 Pa. Cons. Stat. Ann. § 1928(c) (West 1998) (stating

with exceptions inapplicable here that statutes “shall be liberally

construed to effect their objects and promote justice”)); Motley

v. State Farm Mut. Auto. Ins. Co., 466 A.2d 609, 611 (Pa.

1983)). Thus, even though we recognize that this case is close,

we think that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court would reach the

result that we reach. 11

V. CONCLUSION

For the foregoing reasons, we hold that in light of

Allstate’s concession for purposes of its motion for judgment on

the pleadings that the accident was caused by a box dropped

from an unidentified vehicle, Squires’s accident “ar[ose] out of

the maintenance, ownership, or use” of an uninsured vehicle

11

We emphasize how narrow our opinion is. After all, we have

decided this case on the basis of an assumed set of facts and it is

entirely possible that in further proceedings whether in court or

in an arbitration case the facts may appear to be quite different.

Moreover, though we are reinstating Squires’s counterclaims we

are not suggesting that in this close case we see any merit in

Squires’s bad faith counterclaim. Rather, we express no opinion

on that issue as it is not before us for adjudication. We note,

however, that our experience in addressing Pennsylvania

insurance coverage disputes has demonstrated that insureds tend

to bring bad faith claims when insurers reject their claims even

though there are legitimate disputes over whether the claims are

covered.

20

under his insurance policy. We therefore will reverse the

District Court’s order of March 2, 2011, granting Allstate’s

motion for judgment on the pleadings and dismissing Squires’s

counterclaims and will remand the case to the District Court for

further proceedings.

21