The Uniform Commercial Code—SB 122

Authors

Richard Cosway, University of Washington School of Law
Warren L. Shattuck, University of Washington School of LawFollow

Abstract

Senate Bill 122, enacting the Uniform Commercial Code in Washington, was passed during the recent legislative session. The effective date of the new statute is June 30, 1967. Since 1952, when the Uniform Commercial Code [hereinafter cited as UCC] was first proposed by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws and the American Law Institute, it has been enacted by forty-one states, the District of Columbia, and the Virgin Islands. It is now much easier to list the-states which have not enacted it. These are: Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Dakota, South Carolina, and Vermont. As this modern replacement for the older uniform commercial laws and for the hodge-podge of anachronisms which constituted the pre-Code law of personal property security was adopted across the country, Washington became an isolated area of commercial law obsolescence. We were still trying to carry on jet-age commerce with horse-and-buggy law—with nineteenth century sales and negotiable instruments principles, with warehouse receipts and bills of lading statutes prepared some sixty years ago, with no determinable legal system for a multimillion dollar letter of credit business, and with a jerry-built complex of secured-transactions law. The 1965 Washington legislature is to be commended for once again bringing this state into the mainstream of American commercial law.

First Page

873

Recommended Citation

Richard Cosway & Warren L. Shattuck, The Uniform Commercial Code—SB 122, 40 Wash. L. Rev. 873 (1965).
Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/wlr/vol40/iss4/7