Details
- Provides scholars, students and practitioners with an overview of the current state of payment systems law, the problems the law presents for modern payments, and a future vision for overcoming the legal anachronisms of the past.
- Written by an accomplished scholar with a wealth of experience in the areas of commercial law, payment systems, and contracts
- Firmly establishes the historical landscape of negotiable instruments law and practice.
In The End of Negotiable Instruments: Bringing Payments Systems Law Out of the Past, author James Rogers challenges the basic assumptions of the law of checks and notes and its history, and provides a well-reasoned account of how the law could be changed to better suit the evolution of new payment technologies.
The modern American law of payment systems is in disarray. Efforts to create a unified body of law for payment systems have so far been unsuccessful. Part of the reason for that failure is the assumption that the existing law works well for the traditional paper-based check system, and that problems have been created only by the evolution of new technologies. The End of Negotiable Instruments argues that this assumption is unfounded. The basic law of checks is itself anachronistic. There are no other books that undertake a similar analysis--there are legal treatises on the law of checks and notes, but all of them take for granted the basic assumptions challenged in this book. Several articles were published in the late twentieth century concerning the dispute over the application of certain doctrines of traditional negotiable instruments law to modern consumer finance transactions, but none of this literature went on to consider the broader question of whether there is anything worthwhile left in negotiable instruments law.
Readership: Legal scholars and academics, practitioners, students, those interested in payments law, banking, ecommerce, and commercial transaction law.
Introduction
Chapter 1 The Sorry State of Modern Payment Systems Law
Chapter 2 The Puzzling Persistence of the Law of Checks and Notes
Chapter 3 Paperless Paper
Chapter 4 Reports of the Death of the Holder in Due Course Doctrine Are Greatly Exaggerated.
Chapter 5 A Visit to the Museum of Negotiable Instruments Law
Chapter 6 The Bank Always Loses
Chapter 7 Are Checks Ever Transferred?
Chapter 8 What Would a Modern Law of Promissory Notes Look Like?
Chapter 9 What Would a Modern Law of Checks Look Like?
Chapter 10 Overcoming the Past
Index
James Steven Rogers, Boston College Law School
James Steven Rogers is Professor of Law at Boston College Law School, where he teaches commercial law, payment systems, and contracts. Professor Rogers has played a major role in the development of modern commercial law. He served as Reporter (principal drafter) for the Drafting Committee to Revise UCC Article 8, which established a new legal framework for the modern system of electronic, book-entry securities holdings through central depositories and other intermediaries. He was also involved in the projects on negotiable instruments (UCC Articles 3 and 4) and secured transactions (UCC Article 9). He is widely published in law reviews on subjects of modern commercial law and bankruptcy, particularly in the fields of investment securities, negotiable instruments, and the history of Anglo-American commercial law. He served as one of the United States delegates to the Hague Conference on Private International Law project to negotiate and draft Convention on Choice of Law for Securitie
Holding Through Securities Intermediaries and as a member of Drafting Group for that Convention. Prior joining the Boston College Law School faculty, Rogers practiced with the firm of Sullivan & Worcester in Boston, Massachusetts and clerked for Judge Bailey Aldrich of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. He received a J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1976, where he served on the Harvard Law Review and was awarded the Fay Diploma for graduating first in his class in cumulative G.P.A. He received his A.B. summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, 1973, where he studied philosophy and history.
"James Rogers has done a masterful job of distilling centuries of legal developments in the payments field into a spell-binding tale. Long-revered concepts like negotiability are debunked; there are new takes on old provisions; the historical basis of our current legal structure is examined to show that the law as we have come to know it no longer makes sense. The End of Negotiable Instruments: Bringing Payment Systems Law Out of the Past is a must-read for payments professionals, professors seeking rationality in archaic concepts and principles, and those devoted to improvements in the law of payment systems."
--Amelia Boss
Trustee Professor of Law, Drexel University Earle Mack School of Law
"James Rogers combines the comprehensive historical grasp that comes only from decades of labor with a sensitive eye for what works so poorly about the modern law of negotiable instruments. This book should be required reading for anybody that wants to teach commercial law. Given how poorly the law of negotiability has served us in this era of commonly lost home mortgage notes, those who want to make that law better need to read Rogers' story of how we got into this mess before they try to figure out how to get us out of it."
--Ronald Mann
Professor, Columbia Law School
"James Steven Rogers, the pre-eminent historian of American Commercial Law, has written a provocative book that is essential reading for academics and practitioners in the field. Professor Rogers brings together his extensive research on the development of payments law to conclude that the present statutory law governing the field is hopelessly frozen in a body of anachronistic principles that must be rescued from the past to deal with contemporaneous problems. He tells what must be done and how to do it. No credible book or article on payments law can be written in the future that fails to address Professor Rogers' searing indictment.>"
--William D. Warren
Connell Professor of Law Emeritus,
UCLA School of Law
