In The End of Negotiable Instruments: Bringing Payments Systems Law Out of the Past, author James Rogers challenges the basic assumptions of the law of checks and notes and its history, and provides a well-reasoned account of how the law could be changed to better suit the evolution of new payment technologies.
The modern American law of payment systems is in disarray. Efforts to create a unified body of law for payment systems have so far been unsuccessful. Part of the reason for that failure is the assumption that the existing law works well for the traditional paper-based check system, and that problems have been created only by the evolution of new technologies. The End of Negotiable Instruments argues that this assumption is unfounded. The basic law of checks is itself anachronistic. There are no other books that undertake a similar analysis--there are legal treatises on the law of checks and notes, but all of them take for granted the basic assumptions challenged in this book. Several articles were published in the late twentieth century concerning the dispute over the application of certain doctrines of traditional negotiable instruments law to modern consumer finance transactions, but none of this literature went on to consider the broader question of whether there is anything worthwhile left in negotiable instruments law.
Industry Reviews
"James Rogers has done a masterful job of distilling centuries of legal developments in the payments field into a spell-binding tale. Long-revered concepts like negotiability are debunked; there are new takes on old provisions; the historical basis of our current legal structure is examined to show that the law as we have come to know it no longer makes sense. The End of Negotiable Instruments: Bringing Payment Systems Law Out of the Past is a must-read for
payments professionals, professors seeking rationality in archaic concepts and principles, and those devoted to improvements in the law of payment systems."
--Amelia Boss
Trustee Professor of Law, Drexel University Earle Mack School of Law
"James Rogers combines the comprehensive historical grasp that comes only from decades of labor with a sensitive eye for what works so poorly about the modern law of negotiable instruments. This book should be required reading for anybody that wants to teach commercial law. Given how poorly the law of negotiability has served us in this era of commonly lost home mortgage notes, those who want to make that law better need to read Rogers' story of how we got into
this mess before they try to figure out how to get us out of it."
--Ronald Mann
Professor, Columbia Law School
"James Steven Rogers, the pre-eminent historian of American Commercial Law, has written a provocative book that is essential reading for academics and practitioners in the field. Professor Rogers brings together his extensive research on the development of payments law to conclude that the present statutory law governing the field is hopelessly frozen in a body of anachronistic principles that must be rescued from the past to deal with contemporaneous problems.
He tells what must be done and how to do it. No credible book or article on payments law can be written in the future that fails to address Professor Rogers' searing indictment.>"
--William D. Warren
Connell Professor of Law Emeritus,
UCLA School of Law
"...the most refreshingly lucid analysis and enlightened criticism of the subject that I have ever read."
--Bradley Crawford, Q.C, Canadian Business Law Journal