Corbin on Contracts: Force Majeure and Impossibility of Performance Resulting from COVID-19

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Read the Maine Supreme Judicial Court published opinion citing this publication here:
Citation: A force majeure clause is a provision in a contract providing that certain supervening events may excuse a party’s performance obligations. See 14 Timothy Murray, Corbin on Contracts § 74.19 (2021).

Corbin on Contracts: Force Majeure and Impossibility of Performance Resulting From COVID-19 chronicles the law regarding force majeure and impossibility (of contract performance) engendered by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Perhaps no event in history has prompted as much ink to be spilled about contract law as the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic, and especially government reactions to it, have wreaked havoc on the supply chain, forced businesses to shut down, and rendered all manner of contracts intolerably costly or risky. The incalculable disruption to countless contracts has caused attorneys everywhere to examine whether their clients’ contractual performance may be excused pursuant to the agreement’s force majeure provision; a common law extra-contractual theory (impracticability, impossibility, or frustration of purpose); a statutory basis (U.C.C. § 2-615); or an international treaty (the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) Article 79). The pandemic’s devastating effect on contracts has generated significant litigation and has impelled attorneys to rethink how they draft force majeure provisions.

In Corbin on Contracts: Force Majeure and Impossibility of Performance Resulting From COVID-19 the law regarding force majeure and impossibility and related legal theories is chronicled in the following chapters:

•  Impossibility of Performance – Personal Inability
•  Death or Destruction of Specific Things – Prorating Supply
•  Legal Prohibition – Government Prohibition and Exigencies of War
•  Discharge by Frustration of Purpose
•  Impossibility of Performance of a Condition; Remedy of Restitution

In addition, author and noted contract law expert Timothy Murray provides a detailed discussion of the COVID-19 cases handed down during the first year of the pandemic and a roadmap to assist the reader in traversing issues related to the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on contractual obligations.

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