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2025 Annual Litigation Trends Survey
Norton Rose Fulbright has released its 2025 Annual Litigation Trends Survey, analyzing litigation trends across the legal landscape.
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Publication | October 2017
The leading New York case on the impossibility doctrine is Kel Kim Corp. v. Central Markets, 70 N.Y.2d 900 (1987). In that case, plaintiff Kel Kim defaulted on a lease for a roller-skating rink it operated when it was unable to maintain adequate insurance coverage, as required by the lease, due to the liability insurance crisis affecting the United States in the mid- 1980s. Kel Kim sued for a declaratory judgment, declaring that it should be excused from the obligation because performance had been rendered impossible.
The trial court granted summary judgment against Kel Kim, and the Appellate Division affirmed. The Court of Appeals then affirmed, agreeing that the impossibility doctrine did not excuse Kel Kim’s nonperformance. The court reasoned that the doctrine is “applied narrowly, due in part to judicial recognition that the purpose of contract law is to allocate the risks that might affect performance and that performance should be excused only in extreme circumstances.” The doctrine applies “only when the destruction of the subject matter of the contract or the means of performance makes performance objectively impossible,” and it did not apply as to Kel Kim because its “inability to procure and maintain requisite coverage could have been foreseen and guarded against when it specifically undertook that obligation in the lease.”
Read the full article: Defenses of impossibility of performance and frustration of purpose
Publication
Norton Rose Fulbright has released its 2025 Annual Litigation Trends Survey, analyzing litigation trends across the legal landscape.
Publication
In late December 2024, the Ontario Court of Appeal clarified the applicable test for leave to appeal from the province’s Divisional Court, which the Court of Appeal had only recently discussed at length earlier that month.
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