Uniform State Laws Governing Negotiable Documents of Title

Our forefathers, not foreseeing that the States would some day become one country for commercial purposes, failed to vest in Congress power to regulate all commerce, but limited that body to such as was interstate or foreign. An unexpected (and by many now believed erroneous) decision by the Supreme Court of the United States1 in 1869, that a contract between citizens of different states did not constitute interstate commerce, checked the growth of that unity of law so convenient in the development of industries, national in character. For one hundred years, from 1789, when the Constitution was adopted, to 1890, no practical remedy was presented to free commercial intercourse from the inconvenience of a distinct law for each state. In the latter year, New York created a commission on uniform state laws and called for a National Conference to which some thirty states responded. The present year marks their fifteenth annual meeting. The first fruit of this movement was the Negotiable Instruments Code framed in 1896, now enacted in thirty states, its passage in Ohio being largely due to the interest manifested by the Ohio Bankers Association. In 1902, the Conference employed Prof. Samuel Williston of the Harvard Law School to codify the law of sales which was fully discussed at the meetings of 1904 and 1905. Its special features from a banker\u27s standpoint are the sections on negotiable documents of title, the chief examples of which are bills of lading and warehouse receipts. It codifies existing commercial usages and customs by expressly declaring that a document of title to a person or order or bearer, shall be negotiable