It's hard to argue that a decision about the applicability of a particular exclusion in an individual insurance policy as applied to a certain set of facts raises a critical issue the answer to which the universe (as opposed to the parties) awaits with bated breath. Nonetheless, some of those cases get published, and that's fine.
Today's opinion not only gets published, but gets published even after the parties settle the appeal and dismiss it. The Court of Appeal says that it "elected
to proceed with the opinion given because the appeal was fully briefed and raised
important issues." The truth, of course, is that the court had already drafted its 25-page opinion at the time of the dismissal, and (understandably) didn't feel like just throwing the thing away at that point. (The two statements are not necessarily inconsistent.) So it published the opinion regardless. Even though, at that point, the parties didn't care.
