Template:Severability boilerplate capsule

The JC has a hard time understanding the logic of severability boilerplate, but it seems to be this: Let’s say I agree to lend you one hundred million dollars for a year. The terms of are loan are that you must repay in a year, together with fixed interest in the mean time and on the scheduled repayment date I must deliver you a single bowl of M&Ms with the brown ones removed.

Everyone happy, right? Now what should happen if, unexpectedly, it becomes illegal to supply doctored bowls of M&Ms (look, let’s just say OK?)? Without a functioning severability clause, the contract might be void. I might never get my money back.

Really? This reasoning seems to depend on a rather rigid application of a latin maxim (“ex turpi causa non oritur actio”) whereas the common law, if it ever thought that, doesn’t any more (see Patel v Mirza).