A condition precedent is an event or state of affairs that is required before something else will occur. In
contract law
A contract is an agreement that specifies certain legally enforceable rights and obligations pertaining to two or more Party (law), parties. A contract typically involves consent to transfer of goods, Service (economics), services, money, or pr ...
, a condition precedent is an event which must occur, unless its non-occurrence is excused, before performance under a contract becomes due, i.e., before any contractual duty exists.
[ Restatement (Second) of Contracts ยง 224]
In estate and trust law, it is a provision in a will or trust that prevents the vesting of a gift or bequest until something occurs or fails to occur, e.g. the attainment of a certain age or the predecease of another person. For comparison, a
condition subsequent brings a duty to an end whereas a condition precedent initiates a duty.
In computing, a
while loop is an instruction to check a condition precedent, then execute an action only if that check
evaluates to 'true'; after which execution,
control then returns to the beginning of the loop and the cycle of check and conditional execution begins again. By contrast, a
do while loop
In many computer programming Programming language, languages, a do while loop is a control flow Statement (computer science), statement that executes a block of code and then either repeats the block or exits the loop depending on a given Boolea ...
first executes the action, next checks a
condition subsequent, then returns control to the beginning of the loop if the check evaluated to 'true'. Either loop ends once a check is evaluated to 'false', after which control flow proceeds onward, now "outside" of the loop instruction.
Cases
*''
Poussard v Spiers and Pond'' (1876) 1 QBD 410
See also
*
Condition subsequent
*
Necessary condition
In logic and mathematics, necessity and sufficiency are terms used to describe a conditional or implicational relationship between two statements. For example, in the conditional statement: "If then ", is necessary for , because the truth of ...
*
Sufficient condition
Notes
Contract law
Property law
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