Acts of God  ·  an empirical reading
The Afterlife of Acts of God
1847 — 2006

The Afterlife of Acts of God

Workers' compensation, carrier liability, and other places a metaphysical defense goes to keep working.

The doctrinal literature agrees the act-of-God defense is shrinking, or dying, or dead. Two state supreme courts, looked at together, suggest the framing is too undifferentiated. The New York Court of Appeals last adjudicated the defense on the merits in 1918 and has not returned to it. The Illinois Supreme Court kept adjudicating it through 2006, and where the 20th-century IL record clusters it clusters in workers'-compensation appeals applying a "special or greater risk" test to tornado and lightning injuries at work — four of the eight post-1920 IL adjudications, and four of the five post-1930 tort adjudications. Where the two courts did decide, they rejected the defense at nearly identical rates — NY 31%, IL 32%. The divergence is survival, not outcome. Doctrines do not die uniformly; they migrate into whatever adjacent structure statute leaves available, and where statute forecloses the migration, the doctrine simply stops adjudicating.

The divergence is survival

The rejection rates match; the survival rates do not.

merits-adjudication rate per 10k opinions · by decade New York Court of Appeals vs. Illinois Supreme Court · 1840–2010 10 20 30 40 50 60 0 rate per 10k · adjudicated 1920 → 1800s 1820s 1840s 1860s 1880s 1900s 1920s 1940s 1960s 1980s 2000s 2010s N.Y. Ill. New York stops adjudicating. Zero merits adjudications in the Court of Appeals after 1918. Illinois keeps going. Eight post-1920 IL adjudications; four are Industrial Commission workers'-compensation appeals. NY rate IL rate Where the defense IS adjudicated, success rates converge NY 11 / 35 succeeded · 31% · IL 12 / 36 succeeded · 33% — the divergence is survival, not outcome.

The workers' comp afterlife

The phrase moves from carrier to tort, and the post-1930 tort record is four Industrial Commission appeals and one country-club premises case.

every adjudicated case, by doctrinal domain Rows = doctrinal domain · columns = decade · one dot = one case · 72 cases total not reached failed succeeded NEW YORK 35 cases carrier contract insurance admiralty property other tort ILLINOIS 37 cases carrier contract insurance admiralty property other tort 1830s 1840s 1860s 1880s 1900s 1920s 1940s 1960s 1980s 2000s 2010s After Barnet 1918 — silence. No NY Court of Appeals adjudication in any domain. Illinois migrates into tort. Eight post-1920 adjudications; four are Industrial-Commission workers'-comp appeals.

The ledger

Most mentions are not decisions. The ratio itself is the finding.

every mention of the defense, by decade Each tile is one opinion. 269 mentions total · 85 decided · 184 never reached. mere mention defense failed defense succeeded 10 20 30 0 hits per decade NEW YORK 117 mentions · 39 decided (33%) · 11 succ / 28 fail 1820s 1840s 1860s 1880s 1900s 1920s 1940s 1960s 1980s 2000s ILLINOIS 152 mentions · 46 decided (30%) · 13 succ / 33 fail 1820s 1840s 1860s 1880s 1900s 1920s 1940s 1960s 1980s 2000s after 1918 → only mere mentions remain. Krautsack 2006 last IL success. Most of the time, the court mentions the defense and never decides it. NY: 78 of 117 mentions never reached (67%). IL: 106 of 152 (70%). The decided ledger is the thin gold-and-coral stripe at the baseline.

The ground truth

All 72 cases a high court actually decided, plotted on the year of decision.

every adjudicated case · one glyph each · 1835–2006 disposition · succeeded failed domain · carrier contract tort insurance admiralty property other 72 cases · shape = domain · filled gold = defense succeeded · open ring = failed 1840 1860 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 NEW YORK ILLINOIS last NY adjudication Barnet v. NY Central · 1918 IL long tail · 1939–2006 · 4/8 Industrial-Commission workers' comp NY · 35 cases · 11 succ / 24 fail IL · 37 cases · 12 succ / 24 fail · 1 not reached

Methods

Corpus. Caselaw Access Project static bulk (case.law): the full reporter series of the New York Court of Appeals (N.Y., N.Y.2d, N.Y.3d) and the Illinois Supreme Court (Ill., Ill.2d), 1847–2017. West's New York Supplement (N.Y.S.) is in the 273,363-opinion denominator but excluded from every figure — the essay is about two state supreme courts.

Extraction. Regex \bact[s]?\s+of\s+[Gg]od\b over full opinion text, ±3-paragraph window per hit. Related doctrinal phrases (vis major, damnum fatale, inevitable accident) captured in parallel and kept separate. 299 hit-cases on the primary phrase; 416 rows once related terms fold in.

Classification. Gemini 2.5 Pro via Vertex AI batch, temperature 0, one request per case. Four-axis JSON schema: merits_adjudicated (does the court apply the doctrine, or merely mention it?), disposition (succeeded / failed / not_reached / unclear), domain, event_type. 416 rows, zero parse errors. The merits_adjudicated field separates the 72 cases a high court actually decided from the 344 where the phrase appears but the court does nothing with it.

Limitations. Appellate only — trial pleadings and pre-appeal settlements invisible. Two jurisdictions only. Post-2017 requires a CourtListener extension. No hand-coded validation set; labels rest on the ±3-paragraph window, not the full opinion. Pipeline and long-form findings in findings.md; number-level audit in audit.md.