contingent interest

“The fact that the growers retain a contingent interest of indeterminate value does not mean there has been no physical taking,” the chief justice wrote, “particularly since the value of the interest depends on the discretion of the taker, and may be worthless, as it was for one of the two years at issue here.”

I possess a contingent interest in certain books—'Tom Burke,' 'Hinton,' and 'O'Donoghue,' the former after 11,000, the latter after 10,000 copies.

To this we answer, that a consideration was granted to Mr. Field and his associates for their services in getting up the Company, and for their exclusive rights, but this was a contingent interest in the profits of the enterprise, to be allowed only after the cable was laid.

Towards the end of 1587 his name, in conjunction with his father's, appears upon a legal form relating to the proposed cancellation of a mortgage upon some property in which he held a contingent interest.

Though there is nothing known definitely concerning Shakespeare between 1587—when his name is mentioned in a legal document at Stratford regarding the transfer of property in which he held a contingent interest and which possibly infers his presence in Stratford at that date—and 1592, when Robert Greene alludes to him in his posthumously published A Groatsworth of Wit, it is usually assumed that he left Stratford in 1586 or 1587 with a company of players, or else that he joined a company in London at about that time.