Contracts 101: Possibility of Performance
Friday, November 27th, 2009
Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer and I have no claim that this advice should be taken as legal advice in replacement of seeking out professional help. What I hope to do is educate you over a series of small posts about what constitutes a contract and you should be able to figure out when you might need to see a real lawyer. Although this series is in the Australian context many of the principles apply in other countries.
Up until this point in the Contracts 101 series there has been substantial information at each step of the process of explanation of simple contracts. However, element five of the contract is often under-represented in our minds as to its importance.
Possibility of performance means the contract must be possible to complete because legally binding contracts cannot be undertaken to perform an impossible act. This is not to say that an entrepeneur on hiring a contractor is going to be confronted at year’s end by the contractor stating that their sub-contractors had difficulties and there was too much rain in July. No, that does not constitute a barrier to possibility of performance in regards to the contract – more likely than not, such a situation would simply be mismanagement or bad luck. Neither of which the court is open to addressing as a get out of jail free card for businesses.
