Section
If someone sells an item but, before he receives the price, the buyer is placed under interdiction for bankruptcy, the seller may annul the sale and take the item back. The sounder opinion is that this option must be exercised at once, and that neither sexual intercourse with a slave, nor manumission, nor a subsequent sale by the buyer itself effects the annulment.

The same right of rescission applies to all other commutative contracts, subject to several conditions. Among these are:
1. The price must have been due immediately.
2. Obtaining the price must have become impossible because of the bankruptcy. Therefore, if the buyer refuses to pay while still solvent, or absconds, rescission is not permitted according to the stronger view. Even if the creditors say, “Do not annul and we will give you priority,” the seller may still rescind.
3. The object sold must still be owned by the buyer. If it has perished, or the buyer has concluded a manumission contract (mukātaba) for a slave, the seller may not rescind—although a slave’s marriage does not prevent it.

If the item has become defective through an unavoidable calamity, the seller may either reclaim it in its diminished state or share with the creditors for the price. When the defect results from the act of a third party or of the seller himself, he may take the item back and compete for the balance of the price in proportion to the loss in value. Damage caused by the buyer is treated like a natural defect according to the sounder opinion.

If two slaves were sold, one of them perished, and the buyer was then declared bankrupt, the seller may take back the surviving slave and claim, as a creditor, the share corresponding to the one that perished. Should he already have received part of the price, his recourse is confined to what remains unpaid. When the two slaves are of equal value and he has received half the price, he takes the remaining slave for the balance due; another view says he takes half of that slave for half the balance and seeks the remainder with the creditors.

Any intrinsic increase to the object—such as livestock fattening or added craftsmanship—goes to the seller, whereas extrinsic additions like fruit or a slave’s child belong to the buyer; the seller merely reclaims the original asset. If the child is still young and the seller offers its value, he may take it together with its mother; otherwise both are sold and the seller receives the mother’s share of the proceeds. Some authorities, however, deny rescission altogether in such a case.

Where the slave was pregnant at the moment of rescission but not at the time of sale, or the reverse, the preponderant view is that the right of rescission extends to the child. The invisibility of fruit while enclosed in its husk and its emergence after pollination is analogous to the concealment and later birth of a fetus—indeed, the case of the fruit provides even clearer grounds for extending the right.

If the buyer has planted trees on the land or erected buildings, then if the creditors and the bankrupt agree to remove them, they may do so and the seller may retake the land. Should they refuse, they are not forced; the seller may instead rescind, pay the value of the plantings or buildings and thereby acquire them, or uproot them and compensate for the resulting diminution in value. The sounder view, however, is that he has no right to rescind over the land itself, and that the plantings and buildings remain the property of the bankrupt.

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