Uniform Commercial Code (UCC)

The Uniform Commercial Code, commonly abbreviated UCC, is a model statute governing commercial transactions in the United States, drafted jointly by the Uniform Law Commission and the American Law Institute and first completed in 1952. It is not itself federal law and has no force until a state legislature enacts it; every state other than Louisiana, whose civil law tradition retains its own commercial provisions, has adopted the great majority of the UCC's articles, giving American commercial law an effective uniformity that a genuinely federal system does not otherwise produce. Its articles cover sales of goods, negotiable instruments, bank deposits and collections, letters of credit, bulk transfers, warehouse receipts and documents of title, investment securities, and secured transactions, and it has been revised repeatedly since 1952, most significantly Article 9 on secured transactions in 1998 and Article 1's general provisions in 2001, with individual states adopting revisions on their own timetables rather than simultaneously.