Contemporary Payment Systems: Cases, Materials, and Problems (American Casebook Series)

Contemporary Payment Systems responds to the new demands of law and practice in the payments field. While the mainstays remain drafts, notes and bank collections, contemporary practice embraces the continuing developments in electronic funds transfers, new bodies of law and practice under the revised UCC Articles 4A (wire transfers) and 5 (letters of credit), and the explosive emergence of as yet untamed “crypto-currencies” such as Bitcoin and the like. Contemporary conditions call for a more nimble pedagogy to bring the law of payment systems to a new generation of law students. The book offers a leaner, more systemic approach to the law of payment systems. It develops, within each chapter and across all chapters, a continuous narrative arc of problems and hypotheticals to avoid the hyper-compartmentalizing of payment methods that makes it harder for students to grasp the systemic characteristics of payments law. The new edition makes extensive use of graphics as an integral part of both the conceptual analysis and the narrative developing across the chapters, and it includes new developments in crypto-currency (such as proposed UCC Article 12), discussion of Australia’s misspelled banknotes, and even a reference to Irving Berlin’s analysis of the signature requirement applicable to drafts.