Payment Systems

• Semester: Spring 2017
• Course ID: 380C
• Credit Hours: 3
• Unique: 29030

Description

An introduction to the "payments" side of commercial law: traditional devices (cash, checks, promissory notes) vs. their more recent plastic and electronic substitutes (credit and debit cards, electronic transfers, Bitcoins, whatever). Transactions in negotiable paper are the subject of several articles of the Uniform Commercial Code (3, 4, 4A, et al.); the plastic and electronic systems are more likely to be governed by federal statute and regulation, as well as by private contract. Even a concise overview of this material makes a serious exercise in reading statutes. Behind the statutes, and more interesting, is one of the great common-law inventions: the idea of "negotiability." How this works (and why) is a question at the dead center of the whole of commercial law. The intersection of Contracts and Property thinking, and the way it is typically extended from two-party to three-party scenarios, makes Payments a rewarding topic for anyone who likes the basic private-law building blocks. (You do NOT have to want to work in a bank.)