Pennsylvania's highest court told insurers they can't lean on public policy to avoid sex-trafficking claims against a hotel - the policy language has to.
In a decision dated July 21, 2026, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania held that neither the duty to defend nor the duty to indemnify disappears on public-policy grounds when an insured is only "alleged to have enabled or profited from sex trafficking."
The case began with four civil suits from people who said that, as minors, they were trafficked at Philadelphia hotels, including the Roosevelt Inn. They sued the Inn's owners and operators - UFVS Management Company, Roosevelt Motor Inn and Roosevelt Inn LLC - saying the businesses failed to stop it.
Those operators held primary commercial general liability cover from Harleysville, Nationwide and Samsung between 2011 and 2015, plus umbrella cover from Ace Property and Casualty Insurance . Each primary insurer first defended under a reservation of rights.
In 2018, Samsung asked a federal court to declare it owed nothing. Its logic: if the alleged conduct were true, it would break Pennsylvania's Human Trafficking Law, so covering it would offend public policy. A district court agreed in 2023, relying on a divided 2004 ruling that denied coverage in a heroin-overdose death.
The Third Circuit sent the question to Pennsylvania's high court. The answer was no.
The justices would not read an "overriding public policy" exception into policies that said nothing about it. Defining crimes is the legislature's role, they wrote; pricing and excluding risk is the insurer's. Carriers, the court said, are "capable of drafting insurance policies that exclude coverage for damages arising out of violations of these laws ... with premiums adjusted accordingly."
Judges, it added, should not act as a "super-scrivener" to insert exclusions a carrier could have written itself.
The practical message lands on drafting. Coverage turns on "comparing the four corners of the insurance contract to the four corners of the complaint," and the court noted that act-based exclusions "are regularly written and purchased" - pointing to a record that included Ace's abuse-or-molestation exclusion barring coverage for "the actual or threatened abuse or molestation of any minor person" in an insured's care.
The ruling answers the certified question, but the coverage dispute continues. The court assumed a duty to defend existed without deciding it, sending the policy-language arguments back to the Third Circuit.
