On February 21, 2024, the Supreme Court unanimously held in Great Lakes Insurance SE v. Raiders Retreat Realty Co., LLC that choice-of-law provisions in maritime contracts are presumptively enforceable under federal maritime law and that the exceptions were too narrow to apply.

As more fully summarized in Dykema’s November 2023 edition, the dispute arose from an insurance contract in which the insurer, Great Lakes, sought a declaratory judgment and Raiders asserted extra-contractual counterclaims under Pennsylvania law, despite the choice-of-law provision in the policy that stated New York law governed when well-established, “entrenched” principles of federal admiralty law were absent. Great Lakes sought enforcement of the choice-of-law provision for any issue not “entrenched”

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