Insurer priority for payment of PIP benefits; MCL 500.3114(1) & (4)(a); Amerisure Ins Co v Coleman; “Domicile”; Grange Ins Co of MI v Lawrence; Determining domicile; Workman v Detroit Auto Inter-Ins Exch; Other indicia; Dairyland Ins Co v Auto-Owners Ins Co; Student domicile; Goldstein v Progressive Cas Ins Co; Effect of domicile; MCL 500.3163; Tienda v Integon Nat’l Ins Co; Corwin v DaimlerChrysler Ins Co

The court held that the trial court properly concluded, as a matter of law, that plaintiff’s domicile at the time of his accident was at his parents’ Dearborn, Michigan home, not in California. Thus, because defendant-insurer (MIC) insured his parents and he was domiciled in their home, the trial court also properly concluded MIC was the insurer highest in priority and responsible for providing his PIP benefits. Plaintiff was injured when he slipped and fell on a patch of ice in a Dearborn parking lot while stepping out of a rental car he was driving that was insured by defendant-Liberty Mutual. He returned to California, where he received all of his medical care arising from the accident. He sued defendants, asking the trial court to determine which insurer was responsible for providing him PIP benefits. On appeal, the court rejected MIC’s argument that because no record evidence rebutted the presumption that plaintiff’s domicile ceased being his parents’ Dearborn home when he moved into his first marital home years earlier, the trial court erred by finding his domicile at the time of the accident was Dearborn, and by denying its motion for summary disposition. Given that most of the Workman-Dairyland factors weighed in favor of a Dearborn domicile, the court held that “the trial court correctly concluded that plaintiff was domiciled at his parents’ Dearborn home at the time of the accident.” The undisputed facts established he “intended to remain domiciled in Michigan and that he considered his permanent home to be his parents’ Dearborn home, where he exclusively lived while in Michigan.” For that reason, this “was plaintiff’s ‘true, fixed, permanent home,’ to which he intended to return whenever he was absent. [His] home in California, on the other hand, was merely a ‘place of abode’ for the ‘mere special or temporary purpose’ of attending medical school and at which he never intended to stay permanently.” The court noted that even if it “were to apply MIC’s suggested presumption about the domiciles of spouses, that presumption was significantly rebutted by the evidence in this case demonstrating plaintiff was domiciled at his parents’ Dearborn home at the time of the accident.” Moreover, that home remained his domicile “regardless of whether he intended to move into that home when he returned to Michigan, and it would only cease being his domicile if he established a new domicile once he returned to Michigan.” Affirmed.