The Minor's Position: Necessaries, Restitution and Ratification

In one line

The rule that a minor's agreement is void protects the minor, and this chapter is about the four places where the law had to stop that protection turning into a licence to cheat.

In the words a student can write in an exam: although a minor's agreement is void, section 68 of the Indian Contract Act 1872 makes the minor's property liable for necessaries supplied to him; a minor may be a transferee, payee or beneficiary, because section 11 bars him from binding himself and not from receiving; a void agreement cannot be ratified on attaining majority; and restitution is confined to restoring identifiable property, a money decree being refused because it would enforce the very liability the law makes void.

Why the law needed these four rules

A rule that says "nothing a minor agrees to counts" is easy to state and impossible to live with. Four practical problems arise at once.

Who will feed a minor who has no guardian at hand? If no supplier can ever be paid, none will supply. What if the bargain is entirely in the minor's favour? A rule meant to protect him would then stop him receiving a gift or enforcing a mortgage he paid for. What if he confirms the deal the day he turns eighteen? And what if he has the other party's money in his pocket and simply keeps it?

The Act and the courts answer each of these separately, and the answers do not all run the same way. Two of them soften the rule and two of them hold the line.

Necessaries: section 68

"If a person, incapable of entering into a contract, or any one whom he is legally bound to support, is supplied by another person with necessaries suited to his condition in life, the person who has furnished such supplies is entitled to be reimbursed from the property of such incapable person."

Four things in that sentence decide every problem question on it.

1. The supply must be of necessaries. Not luxuries, and not merely useful things.
2. They must be suited to his condition in life. What is necessary is relative: a set of law books may be a necessary for a law student and not for a nine year old.
3. The claim lies against the minor's PROPERTY, not against the minor personally. If the minor has no property, the supplier recovers nothing. He cannot be made bankrupt, and no decree runs against his future earnings.
4. It extends to those the minor is legally bound to support, so necessaries supplied to the minor's dependants also charge his estate.

The liability is quasi contractual, meaning an obligation the law imposes rather than one the parties created. Section 68 sits in Chapter V of the Act, which is headed "Of certain relations resembling those created by contract", and the whole of that chapter is taken up in [Quasi Contracts: Obligations Resembling Those Created by Contract].