In­sti­tu­tion­al di­ver­gence in bills of lading: Re­con­cil­ing China’s pre­dom­in­antly real-right ap­proach with pre­vail­ing global prac­tice

De­vel­op­ment sum­mary

Xia Wang, Jingy­an Liu and Jiayi Wang ex­am­ine the di­ver­gence between Chinese ju­di­cial prac­tice and pre­vail­ing global prac­tice con­cern­ing the legal char­ac­ter of bills of lading in cross-border mari­time trade. Where­as global prac­tice gen­er­ally treats a bill of lading as a doc­u­ment of title rep­res­ent­ing con­struct­ive pos­ses­sion of the goods, Chinese courts have ad­op­ted a dual-attribute ap­proach under which a bill of lading may rep­res­ent a con­trac­tu­al right and/or a real right, in­clud­ing own­er­ship or a se­cur­ity in­terest.