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Full-Text Articles in Law
Secured Transactions History: The Impact Of Southern Staple Agriculture On The First Chattel Mortgage Acts In The Anglo-American World, George Lee Flint Jr, Marie Juliet Alfaro
Secured Transactions History: The Impact Of Southern Staple Agriculture On The First Chattel Mortgage Acts In The Anglo-American World, George Lee Flint Jr, Marie Juliet Alfaro
Faculty Articles
The development of secured transaction law in colonial America was spurred by a litigious conflict between the recognizance and the chattel mortgage. The recognizance was the admission and recording of a debt before the court in order to secure credit. However, court hearings were infrequent in the colonies and often logistically impractical to the average farmer or merchant. The chattel mortgage was a more informal and practical solution to providing lines of credit on personal property. Without a system for recording chattel mortgages, lenders could not be sure in their investments.
In the southern colonies, the emergence of staple crops, …
Secured Transactions History: The First Chattel Mortgage Acts In The Anglo-American World, George Lee Flint Jr, Marie Juliet Alfaro
Secured Transactions History: The First Chattel Mortgage Acts In The Anglo-American World, George Lee Flint Jr, Marie Juliet Alfaro
Faculty Articles
The chattel mortgage acts first arose in the southern mainland English-American colony of Virginia in 1643. Other colonies followed suit over the next 100 years. The function of the earliest chattel mortgage acts was not to legalize the transaction, but to declare it void if not registered, or to provide a priority rule favoring the registered transaction. Legislatures did not pass these colonial chattel mortgage acts to legalize an otherwise fraudulent transaction because reported cases indicate that the common law upheld the nonpossessory secured transaction prior to the passage of the earliest act in the southern states.
The Northeastern States’ …