Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 32.djvu/59

25 LETTERS OF CREDIT 25 upon contracts between others for their benefit and of the effect of notification upon the power to rescind such contracts, are so unsettled in their details, raise so many nice questions and are dealt with so differently in different jurisdictions,®^ that no lawyer would feel justified in advising an exporter to rely upon an instru- ment where it could only be construed as notification of a contract between issuer and holder for his benefit. On any purely common-law theory, the fourth type seems thoroughly unsatisfactory. Without some tour de force of judicial construction, not without precedent as we have shown, the addressee in this type must establish a consideration, and it may not always be easy or even possible to do so. And yet some brief and simple •form on the fines of this fourth type ought to be sufficient. It is late in the day for the law to be insisting that business instruments shall set forth the obvious with elaboration and detail. The days when nothing could be left to inference are past everywhere except in criminal pleading. A deed no longer is required to describe all the appurtenances in detail or even to speak of appurtenances in detail at all. Statutory forms are allowing the one word "warrant" to do the work of four elaborate covenants in a common-law con- veyance. Express warranties have more and more been replaced by warranties impUed in the transaction, and the whole subject has been settUng down to the rational basis of exacting what good faith would require in view of expectations reasonably arising from what was said or done ; so that we are beginning to be able to give legal effect to instruments even though they do not "exclude every misinterpretation capable of occurring to an intelligence fired with a desire to pervert." ®^ Is there not too much of this sort of archaic legal formahsm still involved in instruments having to do with important business transactions? The mere promise to accept drafts, the mere promise not to revoke, the mere deliberate word and deliberate intention of a business man or a commercial entity, committed to writing as a business transaction, avail nothing. Hence, either the courts must recognize the confirmed letter of credit as a legal transaction of the law merchant, standing on its own bottom, or they must treat the words "confirmed letter of «8 Williston, "Contracts for the Benefit of a Third Person," 16 Harv. L. Rev. 43-
 * Holmes, J., in Paraiso v. United States, 207 U. S. 368, 372 (1907).