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Essential Corporate News – Week ending 23 May 2025
The Companies and Limited Liability Partnerships (Annotation) Regulations 2025 and an accompanying Explanatory Memorandum were published on 14 May 2025.
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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
The Companies and Limited Liability Partnerships (Annotation) Regulations 2025 and an accompanying Explanatory Memorandum were published on 14 May 2025.
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In a recent decision, Matco Tools Corporation v. Canada (Attorney General), the Federal Court has overturned a Commissioner of Patents (the Commissioner) decision regarding a patent applicant failing to meet the “due care” standard in the context of an unpaid maintenance fee.
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