220 P. 340 | Okla. | 1923
The parties appear in this court as they did in the court *192
below, and will be referred to as plaintiff and defendant. This is a suit by the plaintiff against the defendant for the payment of an amount paid on a draft with bill of lading attached for $2,440 drawn by H.L. Tankersley and deposited in the defendant bank at Blackwell, Okla., which sent it through its usual course to the plaintiff at Ft. Worth, Tex., which paid the draft. The bill of lading attached to the draft proved to be a forgery. It was on the regular form of bills of lading issued by the Atchison. Topeka Santa Fe Railway Company at Hunnewell, Kan., and purported to be for a carload of wheat shipped to Galveston, Tex. As before stated, the draft with the bill of lading was deposited in the State Guaranty Bank at Blackwell, Okla., being the defendant bank, and Tankersley was given credit for same on his account. This draft was dated January 26, 1917, and on December 30, 1916, Tankersley had drawn another draft with bill of lading attached, which was identical with the draft and bill of lading involved in this case, except date and amount. That draft was proved to be a forgery and a suit involving that draft was instituted in Texas and reached the Civil Court of Appeals and was decided by that court in May, 1919, and reported in
"That a person who negotiates or transfers for value a bill by indorsement or delivery unless a contrary intention appears, warrants: (a) That the bill is genuine; (b) that he has a legal right to transfer it; (c) that he has knowledge of no fact which would impair the validity or worth of the bill; (d) that he has a right to transfer the title to the goods, and that the goods are merchantable or fit for a particular purpose whenever such warranties would have been implied if the contract of the parties had been to transfer without a bill the goods represented thereby."
This act was intended to protect interstate commerce, and we think it does, and when you apply the provisions of the section above quoted to this transaction, it will be seen that all of the reasoning of the case decided by the civil court of appeals in Texas, supra, has no application to the transaction involved in this case. In that case, it was governed largely by custom and what banks and shippers understood the law to be, but in this case a person who negotiates or transfers for value a bill by indorsement or delivery, unless the contrary intention appears, warrants; (1) That the bill of lading is genuine; (2) that he has a legal right to transfer it; (3) that he has knowledge of no fact which would impair the validity or worth of the bill of lading; (4) that he has a right to transfer the title to the goods, and that the goods are merchantable or fit for a particular purpose whenever such warranties would have been implied if the contract of the parties had been to transfer without a bill the goods represented thereby. This puts the indorser or transferer in quite a different position to what a transferer was in prior to the first day of January, 1917. This act has been held constitutional in an opinion by Chief Justice White in the case of Unted States v. Ferger et al.,
By the Court: It is so ordered.