Commercial Law Commons^™

One For All, But None For (All Of) One: Revised Article 1 Of The Uniform Commercial Code (Part 1 Of 2), Keith A. Rowley

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This article examines four major differences between Revised Article 1 of the Uniform Commercial Code and Nevada's current (as of 2004) version of Article 1, codified at N.R.S. §§ 104.1101 et seq.

Course Of Performance As Evidence Of Intent Or Waiver: A Meaningful Preference For The Latter And Implications For Newly Broadened Use Under Revised U.C.C. Section 1-303, Jack M. Graves

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No abstract provided.

One For All, But None For (All Of) One: Revised Article 1 Of The Uniform Commercial Code (Part 2 Of 2), Keith A. Rowley

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Part One of this article examined four major differences between Revised Article 1 of the Uniform Commercial Code and Nevada's current version of Article 1, codified at N.R.S. §§ 104.1101 et seq. Part Two explores how Revised Article I has fared thus far in other states and suggests what the Nevada Legislature should consider when deciding in the upcoming legislative session whether to enact Revised Article I as written, whether to enact it with revisions, or whether not to enact it at all.

The Economics Of Uniform Laws And Uniform Law Making, John Linarelli

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Uniform law making has a substantial history in the twentieth century. It seems to be continuing with some force into the twenty-first century. A significant American law and economics literature, however, questions its merit. By contrast, there have been limited rational choice oriented investigations of unification or centralization of law in Europe. Critics of the uniform law movement in the United States use methods of analysis influenced by public choice theory, political economics and positive political theory. The paper does not call into question the methods and assumptions of these approaches. The paper claims that economic analysis supports public policy …

Modernizing The Law Of Secured Transactions: Nonuniform Provisions Of Georgia's Revised Article 9, James C. Smith

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Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code governs secured transactions in personal property and fixtures. In 1990, the sponsors of the U.C.C. launched a major revision project, which culminated in Revised Article 9. Judged by the marketplace of state legislatures, the project turned out to be a remarkable success story of law reform. Between 1998 and 2001, all fifty states plus the District of Columbia enacted Revised Article 9. In Georgia, the revision process began in 1999 with the State Bar of Georgia's appointment of the Revised Article 9 Subcommittee of the Business Law Section. The seventeen-member committee, composed of …

"Retail Choice" Is Coming: Have You Hugged Your Utilities Lawyer Today? (Part Ii), Nancy B. Rapoport, Jeffrey D. Van Niel

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This part of the article provides a discussion on the intersection of utilities law and bankruptcy law, pre-BAPCPA. (Part I provides a primer on the history of utilities regulation.)

"Retail Choice" Is Coming: Have You Hugged Your Utilities Lawyer Today? (Part I), Nancy B. Rapoport, Jeffrey D. Van Niel

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This part of the article provides a primer on the history of utilities regulation. (Part II provides a discussion on the intersection of utilities law and bankruptcy law, pre-BAPCPA.)

Deconstructing The Debate Over State Taxation Of Electronic Commerce, Walter Hellerstein

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Elsewhere on these pages, the distinguished economist Charles McLure begins his contribution to the debate over taxation of electronic commerce by observing that “America is focusing on the wrong issues in debating the taxation of electronic commerce ....” He proceeds to provide a fundamental critique of the states' existing sales tax regimes and he lays out a roadmap for radical reform of the system that would, in the course of curing the basic defects in the existing state sales tax structure, incidentally resolve many of the issues that currently dominate the debate over taxing electronic commerce. I do not disagree …

Liability Issues Facing Online Businesses, David E. Shipley

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Online businesses are confronted by a wide variety of liability issues covering almost the full range of the standard law school curriculum. The liability problems that face a small business in Vidalia, Georgia, which is selling Vidalia onion products at specialty stores, through print advertising, and by mail, do not go away when the business starts marketing through a Web site. In fact, there might be more exposure doing business online, and there are variations depending upon the nature of the business in question. For example, as discussed below, an Internet Service Provider ("ISP") like America Online has worries that …

State Taxation Of Electronic Commerce: Perspectives On Proposals For Change And Their Constitutionality, Kendall L. Houghton, Walter Hellerstein

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Over the past few years, an enormous amount of attention has been devoted to the problems raised by state taxation of electronic commerce, possible solutions to those problems, and, more recently, the question of whether there is a ‘problem‘ at all. We have both been, and continue to be, deeply involved in the debate over these issues -- a debate that has sometimes generated more heat than light. We view this forum as furnishing us an opportunity to take a step back from the fray and to offer our views not only on the critical issues that are dominating the …

State And Local Taxation Of Electronic Commerce: Reflections On The Emerging Issues, Walter Hellerstein

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When Ed Cohen honored me with the invitation to present the principal paper on state and local taxation of electronic commerce for this conference, I was pleased to accept, but with one caveat. Because most of my waking hours over the past year seem to have been consumed by the preparation of papers addressed to state taxation of electronic commerce, I warned Ed that much of what I might have to say would not be new -- at least to me. But a funny thing happened on the way to this forum. When I set about my task to prepare …

Business Subsidies And The Dormant Commerce Clause, Dan T. Coenen

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In this Article, I seek to respond to the Court's overture with a treatment of of subsidies under the dormant Commerce Clause that moves progressively from the general to the specific. Part I examines key Supreme Court cases to show that the basic question of whether state business subsidies are constitutional remains open and important. Part II then turns to how that question should be resolved, focusing on whether subsidies are fairly distinguishable from ostensibly equivalent, and concededly unlawful, discriminatory tax relief. The thrust of Part II is that both precedent and policy support the traditional, pre-West Lynn Creamer" view …

Time To Try Mediation Of International Commercial Disputes, Harold Abramson

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No abstract provided.

Taxing Electronic Commerce: Preliminary Thoughts On Model Uniform Legislation, Walter Hellerstein

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This report on Taxing Electronic Commerce was presented at the symposium on multi-jurisdictional taxation of electronic commerce at Harvard University on April 5, 1997. This report describes the normative principles shared by most serious analyses of the problems raised by state taxation of electronic commerce. It then attempts to translate these principles into legal rules that could provide a model for uniform legislation in this area. Finally it addresses constitutional questions that will likely be encountered in any effort to implement such legislation.

State User Fees And The Dormant Commerce Clause, Dan T. Coenen

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This Article considers the interplay of two central tenets of the U.S. Supreme Court's dormant commerce clause jurisprudence. The first of these principles exempts from the general proscription on discrimination against interstate commerce a state's actions as a "market participant," rather than as a "market regulator." The second principle, in contrast, renders the nondiscrimination rule fully applicable to the imposition of state "user fees."

Part II of this Article shows why these doctrinal pronouncements stand in an uneasy tension. It also explains how this tension revealed itself in Oregon Waste Systems, Inc., v. Department of Environmental Quality of Oregon, when …

State Taxation Of Electronic Commerce, Walter Hellerstein

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The coming of the information age has profound implications for state taxation as it does for just about everything else. The exponential growth and increasing commercialization of the Internet, along with the sweeping technological and regulatory changes that have reconfigured the telecommunications industry, pose a daunting challenge to the states’ traditional approaches to taxing business activity and the telecommunications system that facilitates it. State tax administrators and policymakers, alarmed at the prospect that their tax bases will disappear into cyberspace, are seeking means to accommodate their taxing regimes to the new technological environment. The business community, on the other hand, …

Lawyers As Exchange Engineers In Commerce: An Empirical Overview, Sandra M. Huszagh, Fredrick W. Huszagh

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This article empirical explores the exchange relationship between lawyers and their clients with particular attention on the variables of experience and practice specialty. The lawyers' perceptions of client relationships are preliminarily analyzed in terms of their discrete or relational properties and their distribution within experience segments within the firm. Enriched understanding of these matters can assist both lawyers and their clients in crafting more efficient and effective exchange relationships here viewed as critical to commercial activities.

The Impact Of The Garcia Decision On The Market-Participant Exception To The Dormant Commerce Clause, Dan T. Coenen

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In National League of Cities v. Usery, the Supreme Court recognized a strong state-sovereignty-based limit on Congress's exercise of its commerce power. In Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, however, the Court overruled National League of Cities, relying in part on past difficulties in trying to distinguish between protected state “governmental” activities and unprotected state “proprietary” activities. In the wake of Garcia, commentators have urged that its reasoning undermines the Court's longstanding exemption of state proprietary activities from dormant Commerce Clause challenge under the so-called “market-participant” doctrine.

In this article, Professor Dan Coenen refutes this argument by showing that …

Predisposed With Integrity: The Elusive Quest For Justice In Tripartite Arbitrations, Deseriee A. Kennedy

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No abstract provided.

West Lynn Creamery And The Constitutionality Of State Tax Incentives, Walter Hellerstein

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One of the more perplexing questions that has surfaced from time to time in the state tax field is how a constitutionally benign tax incentive program designed to attract industry to a state is to be distinguished from an unconstitutionally discriminatory taxing scheme that “forecloses tax-neutral decisions” and “provides a direct commercial advantage to local business.” On one hand, the U.S. Supreme Court has expressed the view that its decisions do “not prevent the States from structuring their tax systems to encourage the growth and development of intrastate commerce and industry.” On the other hand, the Court has frequently invalidated …

Priorities In Accounts: The Crazy Quilt Of Current Law And A Proposal For Reform, Dan T. Coenen

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Moe Promisee has a right under a contract to receive monetary payments from Mae Promisor. Moe assigns his right first to Faye and then to Clay. Whom must Mae pay, Faye or Clay? For more than a century, judges have struggled with successive assignments to different persons of the same contract right. These cases which typically involve rights to monetary payments called "accounts" have generated subtleties of doctrine and disagreements among courts. Today, as a general rule, the Uniform Commercial Code controls these cases. Ambiguities, however, lurk in the code. Cryptic common-law doctrines also continue to govern many successive-assignment problems. …

Untangling The Market-Participant Exemption To The Dormant Commerce Clause, Dan T. Coenen

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There is no theme more familiar to constitutional law than the clash between federal power and state autonomy. The history of that struggle reveals, by and large, a long losing battle by the states. Over the years, the Supreme Court has recognized far-reaching congressional powers, rebuffed efforts to rein them in through use of the tenth amendment, and saddled the states with every significant restraint imposed by the Bill of Rights. From time to time, however, the currents of constitutional doctrine run in favor of local control. In recent years, for example, the Court has stemmed the tide toward constitutionalizing …

Equal Protection Run Amok? An Analysis Of The Nebraska Supreme Court's Decision In The Northern Natural Gas Case, Walter Hellerstein

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In Northern Natural Gas Co. v. State Board of Equalization and Assessment, the Nebraska Supreme Court held that the state could not constitutionally tax the personal property of one taxpayer while exempting the personal property of other taxpayers. Specifically, the court held that pipelines were entitled to an exemption of their personal property because the personal property of railroads and car-lines had been exempted from taxation pursuant to the provisions of the Railroad revitalization and Regulatory Reform Act of 1976 (the 4-R Act), which requires that the railroad and car-line property be taxed in the same way as other commercial …

Freedom From Claims And Defenses: A Study In Judicial Activism Under The Uniform Commerical Code, Julian B. Mcdonnell

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The suggestion that we might today learn something about the judicial process in such a staid area of private law may seem surprising. After all, has not the Federal Trade Commission "repealed" the holder in due course rule thus tossing negotiable instruments into the dust bin? Have not the remaining technical questions been answered by the "detail and rigid precision" of the Uniform Commercial Code so lamented by Professor Gilmore? Surely, the attentive observer of the role of the courts might conclude that there is nothing left for the judicial policy maker in the field of bills and notes. The …

The Priority Rules Of Article Nine, Dan T. Coenen, Albert J. Givray, Deborah Mclean Quinn, Paul Hilton

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Priorities. The very word sends chills down the sane lawyer's spine. But if fear and loathing of Article Nine's priority scheme served as a deterrent to undertaking this enterprise, they served as an incentive as well. The complexity of the priority rules is matched only by their importance, for as long as secured financing flourishes, priority disputes over personal property are inevitable. It is the purpose of this project to set forth and explore the body of law that resolves those disputes: the priority rules of Article Nine.

Book Review: Handbook Of The Law Under The Uniform Commercial Code (1972), I. Boyce Covington

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Book review of HANDBOOK OF THE LAW UNDER THE UNIFORM COMMERCIAL CODE, by James J. White and Robert S. Summers (St. Paul, Minn.: West, 1972).

Determining The Law Governing Performance In International Commercial Arbitration: A Comparative Study, Gabriel M. Wilner

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Persons entering into commercial agreements of a transnational nature have often shown a preference for the arbitration tribunal rather than the court of law as the instrument for settling disputes which may arise between them.

The parties, who may be either individuals or legal persons, such as corporations, manifest their desire to employ arbitration by providing for its use in the arbitration clause of the contract. It is generally agreed that such a clause, whether or not it is considered as part of the main contract, is consensual in nature. But the significance of the agreement to arbitrate is determined …