Definition
In legal usage, ATTENTION is not a term of art with independent substantive meaning. Its legal significance arises almost exclusively in the narrow context of commercial paper, where the phrase "shall have attention" — or similar formulations — was examined to determine whether a drawee's response to a bill of exchange constituted a legally binding acceptance.
The critical holding: a drawee's statement that a bill "shall have attention" does not amount to an acceptance of the bill. The phrase expresses only that the instrument will be looked at or considered, not that the drawee undertakes to honor it. This distinction carries significant commercial consequences, since acceptance transforms a drawee into an acceptor who is primarily liable on the instrument.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A call for people to stop what they are doing and direct their focus to something; also used as a military command to bring soldiers to a formal standing position.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The act or state of attending or heeding; the application of the mind to any object of sense, representation, or thought; earnest consideration or regard; also, an act of civility or courtesy.
The gap between common and legal meaning here is narrow but consequential in one specific direction. In ordinary usage, saying you will "give something attention" is a near-commitment — a signal of engagement and follow-through. In commercial law, courts drew the opposite inference: the phrase signals only future consideration, not present undertaking. A researcher relying on common intuition about what "attention" promises would misread what the law requires for a valid acceptance.
Common Confusion
The phrase "shall have attention" is sometimes grouped informally with other conditional or qualified responses to bills of exchange and mistaken for a form of conditional acceptance. It is neither. A conditional acceptance modifies the terms on which a drawee agrees to honor a bill but still constitutes an acceptance. "Shall have attention" fails to rise to acceptance at all — it leaves the holder with no claim against the drawee as acceptor. The distinction matters because a holder who treats an "attention" response as an acceptance and delays seeking recourse against the drawer or indorsers may find those parties discharged by the delay.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter ATTENTION in Law Mind primarily in materials treating bills of exchange, acceptance, and the law of negotiable instruments. Its appearance in Bouvier is almost entirely derivative of a single line of English authority (2 B. and Ald. 113, 115 — Barnewall and Alderson's King's Bench reports). The term does not develop into a broader doctrine; it serves as a limiting case illustration of what acceptance requires.
Key navigational points:
First, do not search for ATTENTION as a standalone legal concept. Search instead under ACCEPTANCE (bills of exchange) and look for discussions of what language does or does not satisfy the acceptance requirement. ATTENTION surfaces as a negative example in that literature.
Second, the underlying rule — that acceptance requires an unequivocal undertaking — evolved considerably after Bouvier's era. The American codification in the Uniform Negotiable Instruments Law (1896) and later the Uniform Commercial Code (Article 3) formalized acceptance requirements in ways that rendered informal phrase-by-phrase case analysis less necessary. Historical sources will reflect the older case-driven approach; modern sources will point to statutory text.
Third, researchers working in pre-UCC commercial law materials should be attentive to the fact that English cases like 2 B. and Ald. 113 were frequently cited by American courts and treatise writers as persuasive authority. The "attention" holding was part of a broader judicial effort to police the line between mere acknowledgment and enforceable commitment in mercantile correspondence.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's treatment is sparse: a single sentence, a single citation, and an immediate pivot to the unrelated Latin term ATTERMINARE. This compression reflects the term's status — it is illustrative rather than foundational. Bouvier does not define ATTENTION as a term of art but uses it to gloss a specific evidentiary point about acceptance language.
No other major historical legal dictionaries (Black's, Burrill, Wharton, Tomlin) give ATTENTION an independent entry in this sense. The concept is absorbed into their treatments of ACCEPTANCE and BILLS OF EXCHANGE. This silence is itself informative: the term carries legal weight only as a phrase embedded in a document, not as a concept standing alone.
What historical sources collectively miss is any sustained analysis of why "attention" fails as acceptance language while other informal phrases might succeed. That analytical work was done in the cases themselves and in treatises on bills of exchange, not in dictionary entries.
Jurisdictional Note
The underlying rule — that "attention" language does not constitute acceptance — reflects English common law origins that were widely adopted in American jurisdictions. Under UCC Article 3 as currently enacted across American states, acceptance of a draft is defined by statute and requires the drawee's signed engagement. Informal correspondence is evaluated against that statutory standard rather than the older common law phrase-by-phrase analysis.