Research On Legal Effect Problems Related To The Soft Clauses In The International Letter Of Credit

In the modern international trade,a special provision named soft clause in the L/C has significantly reduced credit rating of L/C,and made beneficiaries bear enormous risks.Moreover,soft clauses are complicated,but the International Chamber of Commerce(ICC),the international authoritative institutions of L/C,and many countries have not clearly defined soft clauses. Therefore,academic scholars could not reached a consensus on many problems of soft clauses in L/C.Thus,a lot of disputes came out.Now there is no1/c aspects of the legislation in our country,only precedenting in some law case. As a statute law country,the effectiveness of the case is not directly applicable in China,but with many disputes caused by soft clauses,the courts have to confront the contradictory of no substantive law regulation and a lot of cases coming out,and only to apply related provisions of domestic principles of the civil law and international practice when making judgement.So ICC and different countries shuould judge the legal effect of the soft clauses in L/C,and due to the complexity and diversity of soft clauses,ICC and China avoid this problem,while the Great Britain and American put the fraudulent soft clauses to the L/C fraud to confirm its legal effect.As an international authoritative institutions,ICC should unify format of the L/C,release opinions or recommendation in view of the related problems.Most countries should also actively response to the ICC’s call to use standard format version of the L/C.In addition,countries should formulate relevant laws and regulations to regulate soft clauses problems.For our country,first of all,we need to publish relevant judicial explanation to define soft clause and formulate the specific standard of soft clauses,then to collect the typical judicial cases to develop the case guidance system,in order to improve our legal system in the field of the L/C.