Chapter 2 Some Thoughts about Pedagogy
Many commercially available teaching materials are prefaced with an insistence that there will be no "hiding the ball." However, even the best of such materials rarely make good on the promise. In my view this happens because the materials come at basic propositions too obliquely. The result is that instructors and students are forced to engage in the sometimes painful exercise of trying to tease from an often unnecessarily complicated or even convoluted fact situation the point or points to be made. The CANINE materials use relatively simple fact situations and cut to the chase as quickly as possible. The objective is to instill learners with the basic principles they need to engage in a higher level of discourse. Too often what seems apparent to faculty is anything but to learners.
Conventional commercial law materials also vary with respect to how they enter the interesting and challenging world of secured financing under Article 9 of the UCC. The better materials begin with a look at the debt collection options of an unsecured creditor. Doing so makes sense because it is necessary for learners to understand early on why secured credit generally, and an Article 9 security interest in particular, is important. CANINE begins by putting learners into a hypothetical transaction that they should be able to relate to as a matter of personal experience and poses the question: Why bother with an Article 9 security interest?
The initial glimpse at the nature and purpose of an Article 9 security interest serves another purpose. It brings home to learners the essential reality that Article 9 is rooted in basic legal doctrine, including the contracts law that should already have been learned in the first year. Many students will not have come willingly or readily to the subject of secured financing and they will benefit from some early assurance that the stuff of Article 9 is not so alien as it may first appear. This assurance will help prepare them to deal with the headier questions of how secured credit differs from unsecured credit and how secured creditors fare in competition with unsecured creditors (or trustees in bankruptcy).
Article 9 was extensively revised effective on July 1, 2001. For convenience the revised version is referred to as new Article 9 and the version it replaces as former Article 9 (which governed for over thirty years). Although new Article 9 makes important changes, including an extensive renumbering of parts and sections, the conceptual framework and foundational principles of former Article 9 remain firmly in place. For example, the concepts of a unitary security interest and notice filing and of the so-called "floating lien" continue in substantially unaltered form. Consequently, certain aspects of former Article 9 are treated along with the new Article 9 provisions, highlighting the similarities and differences .
Much of new Article 9 law is intended to remedy perceived deficiencies in former Article 9. Among the more important of the changes are a dramatic reconstruction and a re-conceptualizing of the "choice of law" and the place of filing rules. New Article 9 also quite properly seeks to respond to the impact of advanced computer and communications technology on the transactions that Article 9 is designed to govern. In particular, it undertakes to accommodate the movement away from hard copy documents and traditional notions of signatures to electronic records and, more generally, to the rapid emergence of electronic commerce. The extent to which new Article 9 will succeed in these efforts at reform remains to be seen.