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 promises to generate significant litigation and will impel 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: