In contract law and administrative law, delegation (Latin intercessio) is the act of giving another person the responsibility of carrying out the performance agreed to in a contract. Three parties are concerned with this act - the party who had incurred the obligation to perform under the contract is called the delegator; the party who assumes the responsibility of performing this duty is called the delegate; and the party to whom this performance is owed is called the oblige.
Contract law.
Delegable contracts.
A delegation will be null and void if it poses any threat to the commercially reasonable expectations of the obligee. For example, a task requiring specialized skills or based on the unique characteristics of the promisee can not be delegated. If a specific celebrity was hired to make a speech, they could not delegate the task to another person, even if the other person would give the same speech, word for word. However, a delegation of performance that does not pose such a threat will be held to be valid. In such a case, the obligee will be under an affirmative duty to cooperate with the delegatee to the extent necessary for the fulfillment of the delegator's obligations
Breach of a delegated contract.
If the delegatee fails to perform satisfactorily, the oblige may elect to treat this failure as a breach of the original contract by the delegator or may assert himself as a third party beneficiary of the contract between the delegator and the delegatee, and can claim all remedies due to a third party beneficiary.
If the delegation is without consideration, the delegator remains liable for nonperformance, while the delegatee will not be liable to anyone for anything. Unlike an assignment, a delegation is virtually always for consideration, and never donative - few people are going to accept the charitable offer to perform a task contracted to someone else.
Novation, in contract law and business law, is the act of –
1. replacing an obligation to perform with another obligation; or
2. adding an obligation to perform; or
3. replacing a party to an agreement with a new party.
In international law, novation is the acquisition of territory by a sovereign state through "the gradual transformation of a right in territorio alieno into full sovereignty without any formal and unequivocal instrument to that effect intervening".
