Cite as: 526 U. S. 358 (1999)
Opinion of the Court
tages of promoting social policy and fulfilling the reasonable expectations of the purchaser while fully protecting the ability of the insurer to protect its own interests."); Alcazar v. Hayes, 982 S. W. 2d 845, 851-853 (Tenn. 1998) (surveying the "compelling public policy justifications" that support departing from traditional contract interpretation in favor of notice-prejudice).
In sum, the Ninth Circuit properly concluded that notice-prejudice is a rule of law governing the insurance relationship distinctively. We reject UNUM's contention that the rule merely restates a general principle disfavoring forfeitures and conclude instead that notice-prejudice, as a matter of common sense, regulates insurance.
B
We next consider the criteria used to determine whether a state law regulates the "business of insurance" within the meaning of the McCarran-Ferguson Act. Preliminarily, we reject UNUM's assertion that a state regulation must satisfy all three McCarran-Ferguson factors in order to "regulate insurance" under ERISA's saving clause. Our precedent is more supple than UNUM conceives it to be. We have indicated that the McCarran-Ferguson factors are "considerations [to be] weighed" in determining whether a state law regulates insurance, Pilot Life, 481 U. S., at 49, and that "[n]one of these criteria is necessarily determinative in itself," Union Labor Life Ins. Co. v. Pireno, 458 U. S. 119, 129 (1982). In Metropolitan Life, the case in which we first used the McCarran-Ferguson formulation to assess whether a state law "regulates insurance" for purposes of ERISA's saving clause, we called the McCarran-Ferguson factors "relevant"; we did not describe them as "required." See 471 U. S., at 743; O'Connor v. UNUM Life Ins. Co. of America, 146 F. 3d 959, 963 (CADC 1998) ("That the factors are merely 'relevant' suggests that they need not all point in the same direction, else they would be 'required.' "). As the Ninth
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