The Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) is a comprehensive set of laws governing all commercial transactions in the United States. It is not a federal law, but a uniformly adopted state law. Uniformity of law is essential in this area for the interstate transaction of business. 

Carl Bjerre is no one’s idea of a high-tech guru. Many of his former students will remember how his lecture notes always consisted solely of stacks of 5” x 8” yellow notes, a “technology” that he relies on to this day.  

Nonetheless, Bjerre has accepted an appointment to a joint study committee devoted to amending the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) in light of emerging technologies, to include virtual currency, distributed ledger technologies and artificial intelligence. The study committee is jointly sponsored by the American Law Institute and Uniform Law Commission, of both of which Bjerre is a member. His UCC expertise is the reason for the appointment.  

“Virtual currency continues to be a particularly hot topic in commercial law,” Bjerre said. “Those issues are not resolved by developments in the commercial-adjacent fields of securities regulation, commodity contracts or taxation. Instead, the specifically commercial law goals are chiefly to protect virtual currency’s ‘negotiability,’ or fluid transferability, along the lines of stocks, bonds, drafts and promissory notes.” 

Bjerre notes that UCC Article 8’s sturdy statutory framework might be adapted in some ways to protect negotiability and UCC Article 9 would almost certainly need related amendments as well. 

Recently, Bjerre authored an article on the history of UCC amendments over the past few decades, published in The Business Lawyer which is the ABA’s leading journal in the business law field. He co-authored the article with leading lights of the UCC nationwide, including partners or counsel at Morgan Lewis; Proskauer Rose; and Cleary Gottlieb; and faculty at Chicago-Kent, Penn, and Drexel. The same issue of The Business Lawyer also carries Bjerre’s annual essay on current issues under UCC Article 8. 

Bjerre continues as a member of Permanent Editorial Board for the UCC, and as General Editor of the Hawkland UCC Series, which is a leading multi-volume treatise published by Thomson Reuters. This year he is teaching Secured Transactions, Advanced UCC, and first-year Contracts. 

By School of Law Communications