Section 5-701 (1) (a) applies only if there is “absolutely no possibility of full execution within one year.” 7 If one reads in parallel the disjunctive sentences of the section, a handwriting is necessary for a contract to be enforceable in the absence of any possibility of full performance before the end of a given person`s life8, regardless of the one-year test and regardless of what was likely or actual. Under the terms of the contract, the benefit was necessary “for the duration” of Decedent`s life. This naturally means throughout Decedent`s life and could therefore be accomplished not only before death, but also necessarily. How long before? It is impossible to define a smaller unit of time,9, but it is undeniable that “the length of a lifetime” does not include the time or time the person has already died.10 In practice, the Kormans did not have the opportunity to find that they could stop providing the service at any time prior to death. but the law of scams is technical and asks what might happen, not what was likely or unlikely, so we must ignore this difficulty. Or to view this through a more pragmatic prism, the performance of the Kormans was a number of discrete tasks, and it was almost certainly true that the Kormans had one or more intervals each day in which they did not provide services. At some point, Decedent`s condition could have gotten so bad that next time the Kormans would have had a chance to do something that Decedent would already be dead. If the Kormans wanted to be particularly careful to fill their side of the bargain, they could continue to do what they did until they were sure that Decedent was no longer alive and thus completed the necessary benefit before death, as everything that was later done was considered irrelevant, since that was not at all the subject of the contract. The court considered this as a law of fraud and framed the question as follows: 15.
This obstacle in New York is much higher than that used in some other states that allow regime change to overcome the law of fraud, even though these other states also use the label “unacceptable,” and there are other states that do not recognize this exception at all.
