First Version Of Article Research Articles

The Drafting History of UCC Article 5

This is a source for persons seeking to understand the law of letters of credit under UCC Article 5. The book’s purpose is to bring together material from four hard-to-access source materials, set them out by subject matter, and allow comparative analysis that will add meaning to the spare language of the 1995 version of UCC Article 5, the current legislation. Article 5 acknowledges that it is a basic platform for law that governs letters of credit. The statute assumes that case law and case law history continue to play critical roles in fashioning the superstructure for that platform. Researchers can access current case law in treatises, but the law on which the first version of Article 5 (the 1952 version) relied is absent from most of the literature. Happily, in 1953 the New York Law Revision Commission asked Professor Rudolph Schlesinger to evaluate the 1952 version in light of then current case law. Schlesinger’s Report, first published in 1955, is not readily accessible. It is a superb restatement of letter of credit law at the time the drafters were first fashioning the letter of credit statute. Also largely inaccessible are the comments Henry Harfield, a leading letter of credit lawyer and commentator, prepared for New York’s now repealed 1962 version of Article 5. This resource/history makes those comments available as well as the Schlesinger Report. Finally, the chapters dealing with each section of the current version of Article 5 contain “Dolan Commentary” by the author, an academic who writes frequently on the subject and has been recognized by courts and commentators as an authority on letter of credit law. This book makes the Harfield comments accessible by setting them out after the 1962 version of Article 5, and the Schlesinger Report accessible by presenting relevant portions of it out after each section of the 1952 version of Article 5. Appendix A is the introduction and the conclusion of the Report, which are not set out in the chapters. The effect of presenting this section-by-section chronology is to give the researcher entree to the legislative and common law history of the entire letter of credit article from its earliest version to its current version with commentary by recognized letter of credit commentators.