Affirmative Defenses
Vitiating factors constituting defences to purported contract formation include:
- mistake;
- incapacity, including mental incompetence and infancy/minority;
- duress;
- undue influence;
- unconscionability;
- misrepresentation/fraud; and
- frustration of purpose.
Such defenses operate to determine whether a purported contract is either (1) void or (2) voidable. Void contracts cannot be ratified by either party. Voidable contracts can be ratified.
Read more about this topic: Contract
Famous quotes containing the words affirmative and/or defenses:
“The new statement will comprise the skepticisms, as well as the faiths of society, and out of unbeliefs a creed shall be formed. For, skepticisms are not gratuitous or lawless, but are limitations of the affirmative statement, and the new philosophy must take them in, and make affirmations outside of them, just as much as must include the oldest beliefs.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We are a nation of politicians, concerned about the outmost defenses only of freedom. It is our children’s children who may perchance be really free.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)