Secured Transactions: Problems and Materials

Secured Transactions combines original material with recent cases to teach students about secured financing under Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code. Students will learn how to identify basic Article 9 issues and craft solutions for them.

The book begins with an explanation of secured vs. unsecured financing, and addresses how transactions were dealt with before the institution of Article 9. It then discusses specific aspects of Article 9 including its scope, creating and protecting a security interest, priorities, exceptions, fixtures, proceeds, and enforcement.

The book is built around a series of problems that connect the cases and the original material back to the actual text of Article 9. The original material clarifies and contextualizes the legal issues, providing background and support as readers approach the cases. The inclusion of specific cases demonstrates how legal principles are, and have been, applied in the real world, enabling students to more deeply understand automatic perfection, certificates of title, statutory liens, commercial reasonableness, subordination, and more. The problems emphasize the importance of reading statutes carefully and holistically.

Secured Transactions successfully balances the study of law, and its application. It ably supports instructors without binding them to the text, and is an ideal book for basic courses in secured transactions.

Larry Bates earned his J.D. from the Marquette University School of Law, and his LL.M from Harvard Law School. He spent nine years in practice as a corporate bankruptcy specialist before joining the faculty of Baylor Law School as a professor of law, where he teaches contracts and commercial law, including international and domestic sales law and secured transactions. Professor Bates is also the faculty advisor to the Baylor Law Review. He is the author of numerous professional writings on commercial law and bankruptcy, and a member of the American Bar Association's committee that oversees the National Appellate Advocacy Competition.