Vidhara

The Indian Contract Act, 1872

§237Liability of principal inducing belief that agent’s unauthorized acts were authorized

When an agent has, without authority, done acts or incurred obligations to third persons on behalf of his principal, the principal is bound by such acts or obligations, if he has by his words or conduct induced such third persons to believe that such acts and obligations were within the scope of the agent’s authority. Illustrations (a) A consigns goods to B for sale, and gives him instructions not to sell under a fixed price. C, being ignorant of B’s instructions, enters into a contract with B to buy the goods at a price lower than the reserved price. A is bound by the contract. (b) A entrusts B with negotiable instruments endorsed in blank. B sells them to C in violation of private orders from A. The sale is good.

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Official text: India Code (official)

Official India Code text: The Indian Contract Act, 1872 (9 of 1872), English PDF (bitstream 123456789/2187/2/A187209.pdf, 568,075 bytes) fetched directly from indiacode.nic.in (Akamai edge, DNS via dns.google) on 2026-07-16. Extracted via pdftotext 26.07 -bbox and @nexlex/ingest inline parser. Automated parse; footnotes/amendment history excluded; illustrations restored via illustration-aware re-extraction on 2026-07-19; spot-verified; full clause-level proofread pending. Sections 2-3 repaired 2026-07-25 by re-extraction from the same source PDF (568,075 bytes, sha256 d756d45a…): a page-10 footnote block had been absorbed into s.2, splitting definitions (b)-(j) into s.3 and leaving s.3's own provision missing (D-027).

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