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When individuals are arrested or indicted for a crime, governments have legitimate interests in assuring that those individuals show up for future legal proceedings and also do not cause more social harm in the meanwhile. To serve those legitimate interests, governments may restrain the personal liberty of those presumptively innocent individuals--traditionally accomplished either by incarceration or by release subject to certain sureties and conditions. The choice, in short, is between jail and bail. Currently, governments skew that choice by subsidizing the costs of jail but not bail. The result--wholly predictable given the size and asymmetric nature of the subsidy--is that the United States maintains an inefficiently large jail population that both costs taxpayers too much and excessively limits the liberty of too many. Prior commentators and reformers have correctly identified the overuse of pretrial detention in jails as a major public policy crisis and have urged substantial reforms to current bail processes up to and including the abolition of state constitutional rights to bail (as one state has recently done). We believe that the hostility toward bail overlooks the root cause of the problem, which is the asymmetric subsidization of jail over bail. We propose a balanced subsidization system that can preserve the beneficial aspects of a traditional bail surety system while (i) reducing unnecessary and inefficient restraints on individual liberty, (ii) addressing the distributional inequities of current practices, and (iii) saving taxpayers billions of dollars per year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most of the Uniform Commercial Code revision and amendment projects of recent decades have drawn invaluable input and energy from the committees, subcommittees, task forces, and working groups of the ABA's Business Law Section. The projects addressed in this article are the initial promulgation of Article 2A on Leases; the repeal and revision of Article 6 on Bulk Sales; the revisions to Article 8 on Investment Securities; the revision of Article 9 on Secured Transactions; and the "Terrible Two's" projects involving UETA, the unfulfilled amendments to Articles 2 and 2A on Sales and Leases, and UCITA. Drawing on their firsthand experiences among many other sources, the authors show the wide variety of beneficial forms that the Section's input has taken. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the emergence of a of secured transactions reform in the U.S. and the subsequent transplantation of that model into Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. It discuss the resolution of the legal controversy over buyer status in each of the four countries and examine subsequent legislative amendments.

The article focuses on the challenges surrounding the financial stability of secured transactions in the U.S. Topics discussed include enactment of secured transactions laws for protecting transacting parties and consumers; enactment of Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act for protecting for controling credit risks; and securing loans and investment securities.

The article examines developments in issues related to the 2003 revisions of Article 9 of the U.S. Uniform Commercial Code that deals with secured transaction. Topics discussed include insurance dispute concerning use of collateral to secure an obligation; e requirements for a security interest to attach; and requirement of an authenticated security agreement is fairly easy to satisfy.

The article discusses how Article 9 of Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) applies to planned secured transaction in the U.S. It discusses several ways in which a person might fail to perfect a security interest under the UCC's Article 9 and end up losing all interest in the collateral to some other claimant .

This Article argues that the operation of maritime taw undermines a primary justification for creditor priorities under U.S. law. Under current law, when a debtor becomes insolvent, its secured creditors will be paid the full amount of their debt to the extent of their security interest, even if that leaves nothing to pay unsecured creditors. This is controversial with respect to involuntary unsecured creditors, particularly those with tort claims against the debtor. Defenders of this scheme of priorities have argued that allowing greater priority to involuntary creditors would hinder the availability or increase the cost of credit. However, involuntary creditors have long enjoyed priority over secured creditors under maritime law, and it does not appear that firms subject to maritime laxo heme experienced these effects. Experience with this priority scheme u nder maritime law may provide support for efforts to reform current U.S. law to give greater priority to involuntary creditors more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the scope and significance of the encroachment and overreach of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit into the stewardship of patent law with relevance to its decisions concerning commercial law. It analyzes the Federal Circuit's overreach in state contract law concerning sale and purchase of property assets, secured transactions law and fraudulent conveyance law and state trust law concerning liquidation and bankruptcy of trusts and its beneficiaries.

An essay is presented on the reported disintegration of the American Law Institute's various "Restatement of Property" treatises as of January 2014, focusing on the "bundle of rights" substantive legal theory in relation to American property laws. According to the article, property law encompasses the rights of persons with respect to tangible and intangible items including land, chattels, and security interests. Former University of Chicago legal scholar Harry A. Bigelow is also mentioned.