Revising Article 9 to Reduce Wasteful Litigation

For reasons that are unclear to me, the committees reviewing the articles of the Uniform Commercial Code and drafting revisions are congenitally conservative. Perhaps these committees take their charge too seriously, namely, to revise, not to revolutionize. Perhaps their intimate knowledge of the subject matter exaggerates the importance of each section and consequently magnifies the apparent size of every change. In any case, my own experience with two such committees tells me that the members quickly become focused on revisions and amendments that any outsider would describe as modest. To the extent that the revision of any of the articles of the UCC is going to be more than modest, the push must come from academics or practicing commercial lawyers outside of these committees. In this Essay I accept my own offer to propose a modification in Article 9 that most commercial lawyers will think is more than modest. For myself, I claim only that it might be at the upper bound of modest change; viewed from a distance, it certainly is not revolutionary