The achievements of one of America's most widely recognised legal experts on letters of credit (L/Cs) will be recognised this year when he receives an award from the largest voluntary professional association in the world.

Boris Kozolchyk will receive the Leonard J Theberge Award for Private International Law in a few months time from the American Bar Association (ABA). The award honours people the ABA perceives to have made distinguished, long-standing contributions in their field of expertise.

Barriers to trade

Kozolchyk has spent more than 40 years working on ways to reconcile legal differences between countries that can impede cross-border trade and commerce.

Documentary credits have played a part in that mission since 1960 when he wrote a thesis on L/Cs that would form the basis of what some legal and trade finance professionals consider a seminal book on the subject.

Kozolchyk has been closely involved in drafting various US regulations and is widely published in several aspects of trade financing including treaties on independent guarantees, standby L/Cs, security instruments, contract disputes, bills of lading and trucking regulations.

National Law Centre

One of Kozolchyk's more enduring achievements may be the National Law Centre for Inter-American Free Trade, the institution he founded in 1992 in Tucson, Arizona.

It aims to harmonise trade and commercial regulations between countries and has been influential in shaping legislative changes in countries such as Mexico where the centre helped frame new laws that could eventually provide better credit terms to owners of small- and medium-sized Mexican businesses who currently have to pay very high interest rates to obtain credit.

L/Cs in context

Kozolchyk's seminal book on documentary credits, Commercial Letters of Credit in the Americas, was published in 1966, but its author has been keen to emphasise that his perspectives on L/Cs exist in a wider context.

"Deep down, whether it's been through letters of credit or harmonising trade laws, the goal has been to bring about economic development under a rule of law," he once said.

The views in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of ICC or the other partners in DC-PRO.