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Professor Sullivan Honored by Uniform Law Commission for Work on the Uniform Commercial Code
08/21/2023
Frank Sullivan, Jr., Professor of Practice at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law and Indiana University Bicentennial Professor, was honored by the Uniform Law Commission at its annual meeting on July 24, 2023, for his work in support of enacting a new set of amendments to the Uniform Commercial Code, called the 2022 UCC Amendments. The Uniform Law Commission is a national organization comprised of commissioners from each state that works for the uniformity of state laws.
The commission’s citation presented to Professor Sullivan during its annual meeting’s legislative awards ceremony recognized his “hard work and perseverance in the face of opposition to enact the 2022 UCC Amendments.” Professor Sullivan was a member of the ALI and Commission’s Drafting Committee that developed the 2022 UCC Amendments and is a member of their Enactment Committee that assists states in the Amendments’ adoption.
Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb signed the 2022 UCC Amendments into law on May 4, 2023, and Indiana became the first state in which the new law took effect on July 1, 2023. The Indiana legislation was authored by Senator Chris Garten and sponsored by Representative Chris Jeter. It adopted the 2022 UCC Amendments in their entirety except for the definition of “money” which was changed in response to concerns raised in Indiana and elsewhere during the enactment process.
The UCC, which has been adopted in every state, is the backbone of United States commerce. It provides commercial law rules for broad categories of transactions, including the sale and lease of goods, bank deposits and collections, and secured transactions in personal property. For more than 70 years, the American Law Institute (ALI) and the commission have jointly developed and updated provisions of the UCC to keep pace with changes in commerce. In 2022, both the ALI and the commission approved the 2022 UCC Amendments to update it to cover transactions involving digital assets that either were not handled efficiently by the existing code or not recognized at all.
