By Robert Anderson and Gary Spencer (November 7, 2018, 4:32 PM EST) -- Just when you thought it was easy to understand elective stacking and vertical exhaustion, the California Court of Appeal in Montrose Chemical Corporation of California v. Superior Court[1] demands that one actually read the policies involved. Montrose Chemical Corporation manufactured and distributed DDT between 1947 and 1982 in Torrance, California. Ultimately, they were sued for causing continuous environmental damages in the Port of Los Angeles. In this case, Montrose made a valiant effort to short-circuit their massive coverage litigation involving years of primary and excess coverage and asserted that they could make an elective stacking of policies and vertically exhaust the primary and excess policies in a single year (or selected years). Not without reason, the excess carriers involved disputed the Montrose position and basically asserted that horizontal exhaustion of primary policies across all years was required....