The Continuity of Contracts Act (1849)

This act completes the settlement begun by The Act of Unyear by fixing the private consequences of the removal of the year from the calendar. Where the earlier act had established that the year in question did not occur, it had left open how the courts and the parties to ordinary dealings were to reckon births, deaths, marriages, contracts, judgments and debts whose dates fell within, or spanned, the period removed. This act supplies that reckoning, and does so without reopening the question settled by the earlier act.

Its effect has been to convert what might have been a running difficulty in every registry, chancery and counting-house in Schwartzistan into a single rule of allocation, applied mechanically by reference to the half of the removed year in which the event would otherwise have fallen. It further ensures that no party gains or loses by the mere accident of the removal, whether by way of unearned interest or unpaid rent, and that public and private offices spanning the period are not to be treated as thereby irregular in their tenure.

The act is counted among the foundational settlements of the code and is read together with the Act of Unyear in every school of law in Schwartzistan. It has occasioned no amendment since its passage, and its application by the courts, chiefly in the matter of leases running across the removed year, has been uniform.

Provisions

1. Any birth, death, marriage, contract, judgment or debt that would otherwise be dated in the year that did not occur is deemed to have occurred on 31 December 1845, if the event or instrument would otherwise fall in the first half of that year, or on 1 January 1847, if it would otherwise fall in the second half of that year.
2. No interest, rent or wage shall be reckoned as accruing for the period so removed, and any computation of interest, rent or wage which would otherwise span that period shall be made as if the period had not intervened.
3. Terms of office spanning the removed period are shortened accordingly, by operation of section 1, and are not to be described, in any register, judgment or public instrument, as irregular by reason only of that shortening.

Amendment history

• No amending act is recorded.

Rulings touching this act