The law of frustration is tantalizingly simple when it comes to stating it, but incredibly hard when it comes to applying. One would be getting the wrong end of the stick if one were to treat various judicial statements surrounding the doctrine as axioms to be applied in a rule-like manner. Doing so would wrongly lead to a disproportionately large number of ‘false positives’. The purpose of this article is two-fold. First, it seeks to give heuristic short-cuts to anticipate a common law judge’s approach to a frustration case which is poorly captured in definitions and formulae. It seeks to do so by focussing on the ‘tacit knowledge’ used by lawyers. Second, it seeks to get to the heart of why frustration claims are so rarely successful by elucidating its doctrinal underpinnings.

挫折法则在陈述时非常简单，但在应用时却异常困难。如果人们将围绕该学说的各种司法陈述视为以类似规则的方式应用的公理，那将是大错特错。这样做会错误地导致大量的“误报”。本文的目的有两个。首先，它试图提供启发式的捷径，以预测普通法法官对挫败案件的处理方式，该案件在定义和公式中没有得到很好的体现。它试图通过关注律师使用的“隐性知识”来做到这一点。其次，它试图通过阐明其理论基础来深入了解为什么挫折主张很少成功。