Secured Transactions

This course surveys provisions of state laws (mostly Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code) and some federal laws that apply to security interests in personal property. The term "property " for this purpose includes diverse tangible and intangible items such as motor vehicles, clothes in store inventories, rights in copyrights, trademarks and patents, agricultural products and commodities, contract rights, payment intangibles, accounts receivable, equipment leases as well as cryptocurrency and other digital assets.

The textbook is Lopucki, Lawless & Warren, Secured Credit: A Systems Approach (Wolters-Kluwer/Aspen, 2019 or later). This book lays out the important issues in brief, including any black letter law that is available. Its emphasis is on the relevant statutory provisions and teaching us to apply them correctly. This book lays out the law and then provide problem sets to allow students to test their mastery of concepts.

Aspen often offers a 40% discount on the electronic copy of this textbook to all Maurer students if you buy it directly from their website. But, this is an open-book, open-note examination so that may not be the optimal choice with the examination in mind.

Here is the information about this textbook and the discount offer:

Secured Transactions: A Systems Approach, Ninth Edition

Lynn LoPucki, Elizabeth Warren, Robert M. Lawless

Hardcover ISBN: 9781543804508

Loose-leaf version of the text ISBN: 9781543816556

Ebook (discounted 40% compared to the hardcover) ISBN: 9781543816631

So, one way to save 40% and still have a hard copy of the textbook for the final exam is to order the e-textbook directly from Aspen and buy a really cheap used copy from one of the online sellers of used textbooks. There may be small differences, but the e-copy will show you where those are.

Students also need a Commercial Law--Creditor-Debtor Law statutory supplement. I recommend you buy a used copy or a new copy of an edition more recent than 2015, preferably the supplement published by Foundation Press. Thomsen West also has a supplement used by some faculty. If you are enrolled in Sales for the January 2021 Term, you can use the same supplement for Secured Transactions. You should have a hard-copy statutory supplement for the final examination.

I strongly recommend not relying on an electronic version of the Commercial Law statutory supplement for this course because you need to be able to follow it along with us in class as well as take notes.

The routine for this class is to discuss the theory and substance of the law briefly based on the textbook s explanation of the law. Then, we spend more of the class period working work a series of problems in each chapter of the book. Please plan to prepare each problem assigned in advance of class and bring your questions to class. Each chapter is intended by the authors for one class period of work.

The course focuses on consumer as well as commercial transactions. The course has interesting theory as well as substance that lawyers encounter frequently regardless of their chosen fields of law.

There is no prerequisite for this course. If a student can take only one Commercial Law course, it should be Secured Transactions. Some knowledge of secured transactions is very helpful in imagining the transactions your future clients will have and will allow you to bring in experts before you get yourself and your clients into trouble. This material is tested on many bar examinations and is harder to learn on one s own than Sales. This course helps you appreciate what is entailed in borrowing funds to start your own firm, too.

This class will have an in-class examination and probably a one-essay question plus one or two short-answer questions. I have extensive power-points available from Spring 2020 and plan to augment them for the chapters of the book that we had covered prior to Spring Break 2020.