Madiha Moin, IILM University, Gurugram, India
ABSTRACT
Contract law is regarded as a development of business. The Indian Contract Act, 1872 (hereinafter referred to as "Act"), which is 148 years old, needs to be updated due to the dynamic nature of commercial transactions. The Act's authors could not have anticipated all the commercial challenges that would arise with regard to its application, particularly in a situation like the current pandemic, which is crippling the economy and causing severe financial distress. Although the law made contractual duties enforceable on the parties, it did not establish standardized metrics to determine the threshold of difficulty that could be brought about by a supervening event and exclude the parties from performing contractual obligations. To draw attention to this issue,, The author wants to emphasize the significance of making a distinction between a commercial hardship or inconvenience that interferes with the performance of a contract and the frustration of a contract. While the former is insufficient to excuse the parties from fulfilling their obligations under a contract, the latter makes it impossible to fulfill the terms of the agreement. The article gives reasons for the necessity of court rulings or a standard law to settle the issue while highlighting the differences between the two. The article makes a case for why the matter ought to be decided by a judge or by a single, comprehensive statute. For this reason, the paper discusses the changes various nations have made to their contractual jurisprudence in light of the COVID-19 outbreak.
Keywords: Frustration of Contracts, Uniform Laws, And Commercial Hardships
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