Should auction houses honor all items that accompany their own LOA?

[Exhibitman]

We seem to go through this issue every so often. I have a bunch of random ideas on it:

I want to be sure we aren't discussing the so-called auction LOAs that have been such a scourge on the hobby. An "auction LOA" is a popcorn fart. Totally worthless, literally a promise to look at the item if you pay for them to do so.

Assuming we mean full LOA, a "full" LOA is an expression of opinion. Nothing more. You either accept that opinion or you don't. David is spot-on w/r/t people who confuse these opinions with guarantees. They aren't. If the opinion is given in good faith, that's about all you can ask for; unless the seller offers a specific guaranty of authenticity and refund, you either accept the view or you don't. Separate from that is the issue of good faith. An anachronism such as a COA for a signature of a player on a card made after he died isn't offered in good faith; by definition it is reckless at best, intentionally fraudulent at worst. It doesn't sound like the item in question is impossible.

I am always dubious of people definitively saying an autograph isn't theirs, especially if they've signed thousands and thousands of them, or saying an item wasn't theirs. Not saying Steiner is misleading the OP or wrong in this case, just that my experience is that eyewitnesses are often badly mistaken even about their own possessions and past activities. I had to testify once in an insurance bad faith case and the subject matter of one line of questioning was a letter I'd written several years before on behalf of my client, the insured. I had no recollection whatsoever of writing it. The signature looked like mine, the letterhead looked like mine, I could opine that it was most likely mine, but sitting there that moment I had no way of saying that it definitively was my letter or my signature unless I went back to my file and reviewed it for a file copy to confirm it.

I don't blame a seller for not giving a refund to a third party many years later. Any AH is going to limit the time a buyer has to inspect and verify the items he wins regardless of a COA; the rules of the sale typically state so. A month or two, sure, but ten years later? Come on. Is it really reasonable to expect an AH or any other seller to refund a ten year old purchase? If they do so then they deserve kudos, but if they refuse I think that is not an entirely unreasonable position to take absent a specific guaranty and promise to do so.

All this is completely aside from the issue of legal obligation. That is a different story and most likely would be decided on the basis of the contract [rules] between the AH and the original purchaser, or the express terms of the LOA as between the AH and the third party who now has the item.