Indemnity
Indemnity is a legal exemption from the penalties or liabilities incurred by any course of action. For example, after wars, the losers have sometimes been required to pay indemnities. An
insurance payout is often called an indemnity, or it can be insurance to avoid paying expenses in case of a lawsuit.
In pre-
biblical times, most societies allowed for non-equal indemnity; a person who was only injured was often allowed to kill the person responsible in revenge. This was true of many near-eastern and middle-eastern societies. In some cultures, the standard has been like-for-like recompense, as in "
an eye for an eye".
An innovation occurred with the development of the
Hebrew Bible ("Old Testament"), which put limits on indemnities; in the Biblical view, a maximum limit was applied with the phrase "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth." In later centuries this was anachronistically read by non- as a
promotion of equal physical indeminity, while many Jews and Bible scholars hold that in its original context its function was to
limit such actions.
Indemnification is a
promise, usually as a
contract provision, protecting one party from financial loss. This is sometimes stated as a requirement that one party "
hold harmless" the other. Indemnification is a type of
insurance, which protects one party at the expense of the other. Indemnification can either by direct payment or reimbursement for the loss. Indemnification clauses cannot usually be enforced for
intentional tortious conduct of the protected party.
Corporate officers,
board members and public officials often require an indemnity clause in their
contracts before they perform any work.
In addition, indemnification provisions are common in
intellectual property licenses in which the licensor does not want to be
liable for misdeeds of the licensee. A typical license would protect the licensor against
product liability and
patent infringement.
Comment: "hold harmless" does not imply indemnification. The first says I won't make a claim against you; the second says I will pay off claims against you and/or your costs, etc.
Slaveowners are said to suffer a loss whenever their slaves or servants are granted their freedom. A tacit belief exists that harm is caused to slaveowners whenever slaves or servants are released. Slaveowners may be paid to cover their losses.
When the slaves of
Zanzibar were freed in
1897, it was by compensation since the prevailing opinion was that the slaveowners suffered the loss of an asset whenever a slave was freed.
In the 1860s in the
United States, U.S. President
Abraham Lincoln had requested many millions of dollars from Congress with which to pay slaveowners "for the loss of their property." On July 9th,
1868, part #4 of the
Fourteenth Constitutional Amendment dismissed all of the claims that slaveowners had been injured by the freeing of the slaves.
In 1807-08, in
Prussia, statesman
Baron Heinrich vom Stein introduced a series of reforms, the principal of which was the abolition of serfdom with indemnification to territorial lords.
Haiti was required to pay an indemnity of 150,000,000 francs to
France in order to atone for the loss suffered by the
French slaveowners.
The nation that wins a war may insist on being paid compensations for the costs of the war, even after having been the creator of the war.
* Following the
Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, the
Treaty of Shimonoseki required that
China pay
Japan the sum of 200,000,000
taels (or
liangs).
* China incurred an indemnity which resulted from massacres of foreigners during the
Boxer Rebellion. The payment of 450,000,000
Haikwan taels, or $330,000,000 became necessary.
In the
Unification Church, indemnity is a theological term involved in the
absolution of
sin. Usually, a sinner may pay 'lesser indemnity' by performing an act of contrition. A secular counterpart to lesser indemnity would be if a child broke a neighbor's window, and the neighbor accepted the child's apology as settling the matter.
The Unification Church believes that on a few occasions
God required 'greater indemnity', as when he required the
Israelites to wander 40 years in the desert after 10 of the 12 spies sent to
Canaan reported faithlessly, "a year for every day". "After the number of the days in which ye searched the land, even forty days, each day for a year, shall ye bear your iniquities, even forty years, and ye shall know my breach of promise,"
Numbers 13:34.
