Under the seventeenth-century English common-law doctrine established in *Paradine v Jane*, contractual obligations were treated as absolute: when a party creates a duty upon themselves by contract, they are bound to make it good notwithstanding any inevitable accident, because they could have explicitly provided against it in their agreement. This strict rule persisted until *Taylor v Caldwell* (1863), where the court excused performance following the accidental destruction of a music hall by introducing the "implied term" doctrine. The court reasoned that in contracts dependent on the continued existence of a specific thing, an implied condition exists that the perishing of that thing excuses performance, thereby giving effect to the presumed intention of the parties. In the twentieth century, however, legal theorists rejected this rationale as a judicial fiction that imputes unarticulated intentions to the parties. These theorists argued that contractual discharge under the doctrine of frustration does not effectuate hypothetical intentions, but rather operates as an external rule of law imposed by courts when unforeseen events make performance radically different from what was undertaken.
It can be most reasonably inferred from the passage that the seventeenth-century doctrine in *Paradine v Jane* and the nineteenth-century decision in *Taylor v Caldwell* shared which one of the following assumptions?
- AThe accidental destruction of a contract's subject matter automatically excuses both parties from performing their contractual duties.
- BCourts are justified in modifying contractual obligations whenever supervening commercial hardships render performance economically impractical.
- The presence or absence of contractual excuses must conceptually derive from the provisions or intentions of the contracting parties rather than from external legal rules.Cevap
- DContracting parties routinely anticipate unforeseen supervening events but deliberately omit explicit contingency clauses from their written agreements.
- EJudicial intervention in private agreements should prioritize broad social policy considerations over the expressed intentions of the contracting parties.