Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, in a series of landmark decisions between the 1750s and 1780s, established the fundamental common law principles governing insurance contracts — including good faith, indemnity, and the basis of loss adjustment — that remain influential today.

Mansfield's courts were frequented and reported in the same public sphere that sustained Johnson, Boswell, and the periodical culture of the 1760s–80s; the dramatisation of insurance disputes, fraud, and justice entered the moral imagination of the later eighteenth century.