Crossroads in Private International Law // Problems in Determining the Proper Law of the Contract in Confirmed Letters of Credit

The Centre for Private International Law & Transnational Governance invites you to attend the next webinar in our Crossroads in Private International Law webinar series. You can find the link to register at the bottom of this page.

Liwen Leung (National University of Singapore) will deliver a webinar “Problems in Determining the Proper Law of the Contract in Confirmed Letters of Credit”.

Letters of credit (LCs) are used in international trade to assure the seller of payment following presentation of compliant documents to the issuing bank, which is usually overseas in the buyer's jurisdiction. The bank’s obligation can be characterised as contractual and so the issue of the proper law of the contract arises.

Sometimes, the LC is confirmed by another bank located in the seller's jurisdiction, which enables the seller to present documents to and receive payment from the confirming bank instead. The confirming bank will then seek reimbursement from the issuing bank. The issue of the proper law of the inter-bank contract arises.

Many LCs do not provide for a choice of law and refer to the UCP 600 instead. But the UCP 600 is silent on many key issues, which must be decided by domestic law. This talk will discuss problems in determining the proper law of the contract for confirmed LCs.

Biography

Liwen is a Research Associate at the Centre for Maritime Law (CML) at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He holds LLB and LLM (Maritime Law) degrees from NUS. He contributes to the CML CMI database of judicial decisions on international maritime conventions and his work has been cited by the Singapore Court of Appeal. He is currently a PhD candidate at NUS Law.