In full force and effect

The JC’s guide to writing nice.™
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Common trope of contractual documentation is the sort of warranty phased as “Company has done [X] and [X] remains unremedied/in full force and effect/outstanding/in existence”, thus dividing the contractual plane into a two magisteria: a snapshot of some point of time in the past; that unreachable realm of what is done and and printed to the eternal master-tape of posterity; and the present legacy of that past event: what practical or commercial bearing it has on relations between the merchants to the contract in the moment.

So you will see formulations like the following (the text in red being historical, and green being its present implication:

If the Company has committed an event of default, and that event of default, if capable of remedy, is continuing.

The Company has obtained all necessary approvals and such approvals remain in full force and effect.

Now the JC has a maxim — “there is no past tense in code” — and really the same should be true in a contract, being after all a form of human code. A state of affairs in the past entitling a party to take action, which Q.E.D. it did not take, and which has since been rectified, has no relevance to the present conduct of commercial relations. It is a black, dead branch on the tree of forward possibility. There is no reason it should, once fully addressed, continue to confer any rights under a contract. If it is not capable of being addressed, the same principle goes: Q.E.D. it cannot have been rectified, will still exist into the present, and its history is similarly unimportant. What matters is now. A legal contract is of the present.

This has implications for drafting:

{{quote|If the Company has committed an is subject to an unremedied event of default, and that event of default, if capable of remedy, is continuing }.

The Company has obtained all necessary approvals and such approvals remain in full force and effect .

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