By Law, Everything Is Possible In California – Contracts and Commercial Law
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The California Civil Code includes a number of decidedly gnomic
provisions. Section 1597 is one of these. It purports
to answer the question of what is possible:
Everything is deemed possible except that which is impossible in
the nature of things.
The problem with the statute is that it doesn’t fully answer
the question because to know what is possible, one must know what
is impossible and the statute doesn’t provide a definition of
impossibility. In this regard, I am reminded of the following
lines from James Joyce’s Ulysses:
But can those have been possible seeing that they
never were? Or was that only possible which came to
pass?
But why define what is possible? The reason is that Civil
Code requires that the object of a contract must, among other
things, be possible by the time that it is to be performed.
Cal. Civ. Code § 1596. When a contract that has a single
object that is impossible of performance, the entire contract is
void. Cal. Civ. Code § 1598.
Happy Bloomsday!
Today is Bloomsday. Joyce chose June 16, 1904 as the day
on which most (but not all) of the action
in Ulysses takes place. It is called
Bloomsday because the hero of the novel is Leopold
Bloom. It was on June 16, 1904 that Joyce and his future
wife, Nora Barnacle, had their first date (and intimate
contact).
Finn’s Hotel in Dublin,
where Nora worked in 1904
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