Slightly different, though I know what you mean. Our own venerable Lord Denning would always do his best for little old ladies and the like, often taking an ex post facto view of what the contract should mean in the interests of ‘justice’. That lead to impossible case law, because his judgments frequently involved massive non sequiturs which did not translate into other factual matrices.

But here, I think, the Court of Appeal were consciously trying to get at what both parties had intended at the time, and the truth was that insurers were trying to force an interpretation onto the words that had really never been intended.

I say this as someone who has spent the last 18 years defending insurers. I’ve also tried to consider objectively what I would have advised them had I been asked about the claim. Probably exactly what their lawyers did say! ;-)