The term "warranty" in insurance law (more so than its counterpart in general contract law) is a critical term entailing severe consequences. Accordingly, many a sympathetic judge has often been constrained to construe a warranty to be a lesser term - in particular, a term delimiting a risk which functions a suspensive condition. The paper attempts to examine when it is possible to distinguish one from the other, to explore the consequences of the breach of such a warranty , and to determine whether there is a distinction in this regard between the marine and non-marine regimes.