10 Withholding Performance

10.01 Very often a contract provides that one of the parties shall not be liable to perform unless or until some event occurs. Where this is so, the occurrence of the event in question is, as we have seen,1 a ‘condition precedent’ to the duty to perform in the sense used by Corbin,2 namely ‘some operative fact subsequent to acceptance and prior to discharge, a fact upon which the rights and duties of the parties depend’.3 Where the condition precedent in question is something to be done by the promisor, we have an inbuilt remedy for delay, namely the right of the...