Law Commons^™

A Conditional Intent To Perform, Gregory Klass

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The doctrine of promissory fraud holds that a contractual promise implicitly represents an intent to perform. A promisor’s conditional intent to perform poses a problem for that doctrine. It is clear that some undisclosed conditions on the promisor’s intent should result in liability for promissory fraud. Yet no promisor intends to perform come what may, so there is a sense in which all promisors conditionally intend to perform.

Building on Michael Bratman’s planning theory of intentions, this article provides a theoretical account of the distinction between “foreground” and “background” conditions on intentions in general and then explains why foreground conditions …