Every contract in which amount of damage or compensation for breach of an obligation is determined in anticipation thereof is void to that extent except the parties may agree therein upon an amount presumed to be the damage for breach in cases where it would be impracticable or extremely difficult to fix actual damage.
S.D. Codified Laws § 53-9-5
Contracts fixing damages void, exception
Applied in 7 court decisions — leading case BankWest, N.A. v. Groseclose (1995)
Most recently applied in In Re Tri-State Ethanol Co. LLC (November 2006)
Source: CivC 1877, §§ 956, 957; CL 1887, §§ 3580, 3581; RCivC 1903, §§ 1274, 1275; RC 1919, §§ 895, 896; SDC 1939, § 10.0704.
How often courts cite this section
Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.
Official source: South Dakota Legislature. Reproduced from public-domain South Dakota statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.