The Business Lawyer at 75 and Secured Transactions Under Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code

Abstract

In honor of the seventy-fifth anniversary of The Business Lawyer (TBL), we reviewed the roughly 400 papers published in TBL on secured transactions since inception, in 1946. We find that, while TBL has always provided excellent coverage of secured credit, earlier works were more likely to focus on questions of policy than those published more recently, which tend to be more technical. This is curious, both because secured transactions have been the subject of sometimes ferocious academic debates in other journals about their distributive effects, and because TBL often includes policy-oriented scholarship in other business-law fields (e.g., corporate governance). We argue that TBL should actively seek papers on secured credit policy, in part because technologies like distributed ledgers may threaten to render all secured transactions . .. academic.