The Uniform Commercial Code Comes of Age

Once upon a time back in the elegant and well-ordered Victorian age, a new organization known as the National Conference of State Boards of Commissioners for Promoting Uniformity of Legislation in the United States undertook the task of drafting a Negotiable Instruments Law (NIL) for adoption by the legislatures of the various states. The law was finally prepared and recommended by the Commissioners for adoption in 1896, and, by December of 1900, fifteen states had adopted it. In that month, Dean Ames, of the Harvard Law School, loosed a blast at this new law in an article in the Harvard Law Review.