The most significant point decided in The Aramis 1 was that no contractual relationship between a shipowner and the holder of a bill of lading could be inferred merely from the presentation of the bill by the holder to the shipowner, followed by the delivery, by the shipowner to the holder, of part of the goods covered by the bill. A fortiori, no such contract arose where no goods at all had been delivered in response to the presentation of the bill. Hence, the holders of the bills of lading had no claims in contract against the shipowner for, respectively, short delivery and non-delivery, where the circumstances in which they acquired the bills were not such as to transfer any contractual rights to them under s. 1 of the Bills of Lading Act 1855.

The legal background to the decision is to be found in two elementary common law principles. The first is the doctrine of privity of contract: a bill of lading contains, or evidences, a contract between shipper and carrier; and such a contract cannot, at common law, confer rights or impose obligations on third parties such as the consignee named in the bill or any other person to whom the bill had been transferred. The second is (or was) that the common law did not, as a general rule, give effect to the assignment of choses in action: before the provision of the Judicature Act 1873 which is now contained in s. 136(1) of the Law of Property Act 1925, such assignment took effect only in equity. Bills of lading were, of course, frequently transferred while the goods were in transit, and it is perhaps unfortunate that the famous case of Lickbarrow v. Mason 2 was concerned only with the effects of such transfers on proprietary and possessory rights. Had it been concerned also with contractual rights, a custom creating an exception to the non-assignability of choses in action might have been established; but the point did not arise and no attempt was made in any later case to establish such a custom. The combined effect of the two common law principles was that the transfer of a bill of lading did not vest any contractual rights under the bill of lading in the transferee. No attempt seems to have been made in the early cases to argue that such rights might be transferred by a process of equitable assignment. Perhaps the reason why no such attempt was made was that, in this context, the machinery of equitable assignment was commercially