TCS: Tech Central Station – The Wrong Way to Right Wrongs

Stephen Bainbridge has a piece at Techcentralstation today ( Hey, are you noticing a certian political bias in my news sources yet ? ) on the attempt to sue Lloyd’s of London for slavery reparations, given that they insured all those slaving ships. Obviously following on from Holocaust and similar cases as the Good Professor notes. Jeff Goldstein also has a take on it.
There’s one more level of difficulty in pursuing this case methinks.
Lloyd’s doesn’t actually provide insurance. It’s a marketplace, not an insurer. The actual insurers are the syndicates, and these wrap up ( literally, stop their legal existence ) at the end of the trading year. There has been in the past a three year wait to see if there’ll be any late claims, but this I think changed recently ( well, recently to someone of my vintage ).
So it would appear that the people who profited from such insurance, and thus the people who should stump up any reparations, would be the members of those syndicates that actually wrote the insurance and received the premiums.
Which might be fine except for the fact that slave trading was abolished in the British Empire in 1807, and slavery itself in 1833. There would most certainly not be any syndicates who would provide insurance after the second date.
So, the people who could even in theory be liable for reparations would be the descendants of those who participated in those one year syndicates pre 1833.
Suing Lloyd’s itself , the marketplace in which the transactions happened, is akin to suing the NY Stock Exchange because its member firms made money raising capital for a company that profited from slavery : or the Federal Govt because it taxed such profits.
I wouldn’t put it past the plaintiff’s bar to attempt either but I wouldn’t expect them to succeed.