VA · jury_instructions
Va. Model Jury Instr. Civ. No. 45.450
Impossibility as Defense
A party is excused from their failure to perform a contract if performance became impossible
after the contract was made. Where a party relies on impossibility as a defense, they must prove
by the greater weight of the evidence:
(1) that performance of their obligations under the contract was rendered impossible; and
(2) that they did not cause the circumstance which made their performance impossible; and
(3) that the circumstance which rendered performance impossible was not reasonably foreseeable
when the parties made the contract.
History
Virginia Model Jury Instructions – Civil, Release 26, April 2026. The unannotated set, posted by the Supreme Court of Virginia at vacourts.gov; the book states that it is made available with the permission of the publisher, Matthew Bender & Company, Inc.
Provenance
- Source
- vacourts.gov
- Retrieved
- 2026-10-11
- Edition
- civ-2026-04-01
- Content hash
551e5c087c45b1f8446702c6fd541a90bb31f45a2d9a091826a6330797042f61
The link goes to the issuing authority’s own document — the one we read to produce this record. Where a source publishes whole titles rather than sections, your browser may need a moment to jump to the provision.
Unofficial copy of government-published law, reproduced from official sources with full provenance. Not an official publication; verify against official sources before relying on it in a filing. Records in the 'guidance' corpus, and only that corpus, are sub-regulatory (interpretive guidelines, survey procedures) and are not binding law. Validity bounds follow each jurisdiction's declared temporalBasis.