Rarely will a court enforce a continuous operation obligation by ordering a tenant to stay in business at its leased space. Yet, from time to time a landlord will seek an injunction to force a tenant to keep its store open. A simplistic explanation as to why courts don’t issue such orders is because landlords need to show an irreparable injury, and if a landlord can be compensated by the payment of money, its injury isn’t irreparable.
Landlords confronted with a tenant bound by a covenant to be “open and operating,” but on the verge of breaching that obligation by closing its store, usually plead the “domino effect,” expressed by Benjamin Franklin thusly: [Read more…]
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“Notwithstanding,” is the draftsperson’s blanket cure to gaps or deficiencies in a document. It is an efficient, fast way to deal with an exception to a generality. As such, sentences beginning with this magic word are useful. They enable us to employ overbroad clauses because “notwithstanding” pulls our language back for the exceptions we have thought about. In other words, carefully written, they achieve the desired purpose.
We had a posting teed up for this week, ready to click the “publish button” today. Then we read an on-line article last night, one about the most visible retail real estate we have – shopping malls. So, for the first time in nearly 500 Ruminations blog postings, we are scrapping (actually delaying) our planned posting, one focused on the danger of just plopping in new text at the last minute without reading all of the “notwithstanding” provisions already in that document. Basically, we interrupt your regularly scheduled blog posting to bring you this important message, one written today.
Last week, we wrote about a court decision interpreting a lease’s poorly written force majeure clause. If you missed it, click: 
We’ve all seen, or perhaps been assaulted by, a surfeit of articles about force majeure clauses and how all of our agreements should include one. Other pundits have gotten way ahead of this one by explaining how we will have a better world if the advice to include such clauses would be taken by all. They’ve noted that very few agreements with a force majeure provision have covered the kind of closures we have experienced and are still experiencing. But, what we’ve not seen is much understanding that there is nothing special about a “force majeure” clause: it is no more than another risk-shifting device. What differentiates these provisions from co-tenancy or fire damage provisions is that force majeure clauses don’t know in advance how a particular risk will manifest itself. Even though some speak of “labor disputes,” “acts of G-d,” “public enemies,” etc., they invariably end with: “or other events beyond the control of a party” or some such. Without getting into the rules of contract interpretation, we’ll simply note that this teaches that these clauses are intended to relieve one party or the other of an obligation if something beyond the control of the obligated party prevents performance. 
The court opinion we wrote about last week continues to bother us. It wasn’t only about the court decision’s primary question of whether an “election,” once made, can be revoked. There is a second aspect that bothers us, one that we will get to about 300 words from now. First, we’ll summarize what bothered us about how the lease didn’t “do the right thing,” “didn’t keep the question out of a court.” And, if the parties went to court, the lease didn’t give the court a rule or even guidance.
We agree with most judicial decisions, though there are a very few we think are misguided (read that as “wrong”). But, it isn’t very often at all when we’re not sure what we think. Today, we’ll present one of those, a “slip opinion” about whether a landlord could “withdraw” a notice when the lease didn’t say so – either way.
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