Commerce requires irreducible minimum certainty about legal meaning

Evidence

There are a vast group of matters on which we need rules for the guidance of future conduct on as broad and authoritative a basis as possible. You cannot today say that there need not be consideration moving from the beneficiary of a letter of credit to the issuer and tomor- row say that there need be. You cannot today say that a check need not contain an unconditional promise or order to pay to be negotiable and tomorrow that it must. You cannot say today that F.0.B. means free on board and tomorrow that it means only that the seller must get the goods as far as his shipping room. And so on. Mankind needs an irreducible minimm of certainty in order to operate efficiently. — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process, 4856

Categorization

• XREF: The F.O.B. and letter-of-credit examples animate the book’s larger claim that some legal meanings must stay fixed across private compromise, extending chapter 11 on trade terms as optional facilities parties adopt. — connects to: Precedent expresses a universal human need for predictability, not a common-law peculiarity — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 4854; Regulated trade terms bind licensees to their defined meanings — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 1576; Commerce requires liberty, contract security, trust, and justice (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Commerce requires liberty, contract security, trust, and justice #expands (0.80)
• The Rule of Law values predictability and uniformity over individual justice #expands (0.72) — Frederick Schauer, Thinking Like a Lawyer, 61