Carl S. Bjerre
Biography
Carl S. Bjerre is an authority on the Uniform Commercial Code and related bodies of consensual business transactions law. He is past chair of the American Association of Law Schools section on Commercial and Related Consumer Law, as well as past chair of the Investment Securities Subcommittee of the ABA’s Uniform Commercial Code Committee. He has been a visiting fellow at Oxford, with the Commercial Law Centre of Harris Manchester College. He has been a fellow at the University of Auckland, New Zealand (School of Business and Economics, Commercial Law Department). He was a visiting professor at the University of Illinois College of Law and at Brooklyn Law School. For a number of years he was General Editor of the multi-volume Hawkland Uniform Commercial Code Series treatise.
Active in national and international law reform projects, Professor Bjerre is an appointed member of the Permanent Editorial Board for the Uniform Commercial Code; a gubernatorial appointee to the Uniform Law Commission; and an elected member of the American Law Institute. He served on the Joint Drafting Committee for the 2022 amendments that modernized the entire UCC for emerging technologies, and was also active with the joint drafting committees for two previous major revisions to UCC Article 9 governing secured transactions. He was a member of the United States delegation for the negotiation of the Geneva Securities Convention; and was closely involved with the United States ratification of the Hague Securities Convention.
At Oregon Law, Bjerre is the Kaapcke Professor of Business Law. Prior to joining the Oregon Law faculty, he practiced transactional finance law with the multinational law firm of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP in New York City. A native of Los Angeles, California, he studied literature and philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, and earned his J.D. magna cum laude from Cornell Law School. Aside from his work, Bjerre is active in the Democratic Party of Lane County and the Democratic Party of Oregon, and is an invited participant in the 2026-27 Lawyers for Good Government Leadership Academy.
Publications:
Books and Book Chapters
Carl S. Bjerre, Revised Article 8: Investment Securities, in Hawkland Uniform Commercial Code Series (Thomson Reuters 2020) (with William Hawkland & James S. Rogers)
Carl S. Bjerre, Revised Article 9: Secured Transactions, in Hawkland Uniform Commercial Code Series (Thomson Reuters 2020) (with William Hawkland & Frederick H. Miller)
Carl S. Bjerre, Sandra M. Rocks and Kathryn Witchger, The ABCs of the UCC, Article 8: Investment Securities, 2d edition revised (American Bar Association 2014); 3d edition (forthcoming 2026)
Carl S. Bjerre, Project Finance and Consent, chapter of Privatising Development: Transnational Law, Infrastructure and Human Rights, edited by Michael B. Likosky (Leiden and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers 2005)
Selected Journal Articles
Flow of Commerce, Flow of Traffic, 17 Brooklyn J. of Corp. Fin. & Commercial L. 21 (Fall 2022) (invited symposium in honor of Professor Neil B. Cohen)
The UCC and the ABA’s Business Law Section: In Praise of the Omnium Gatherum, 75 Business Lawyer 2411 (2020) (with Amelia H. Boss, Charles W. Mooney, Jr., Edwin E. Smith, Sandra M. Rocks, Steven L. Harris, and Steven O. Weise)
A Guide to the Hague Securities Convention for U.S. Lawyers, 47 Unif. Comm’l Code L.J. 389 (2018) (with Rocks, Smith and Weise)
Changes in the Choice-of-Law Rules for Intermediated Securities: The Hague Securities Convention Is Now Live, Business Law Today (August 2017) (with Rocks and Smith)
Contours of an Adverse Claim, 78 Business Lawyer 1263 (August 2023)
Secured Lender's Recovery for Wrongfully Invalidated Stock Collateral, 77 Business Lawyer 1315 (August 2022)
Choice of Law for a Security's Validity, 76 Business Lawyer 1371 (August 2021)
Automatic Assignment of Cause of Action under Trust Indenture, 75 Business Lawyer 2691 (August 2020)
Intermediated Securities: Legal Problems and Practical Issues (Book Review), 27 Banking and Financial L. Rev. 753 (2012)
A Transactional Approach to the Hague Securities Convention, 3 Capital Markets Law J. 109 (2008) (with Sandra M. Rocks)
Mental Capacity as Metaphor, 18 Int’l J. Semiotics of L. 101 (2005)
Principle and Utility in the Structure of Securities Ownership: A Comment on Schwarcz and Benjamin, 12 Duke J. Comp. & Int’l L. 331 (2002) (in symposium on international structured finance transactions)
Secured Transactions Inside Out: Negative Pledge Covenants, Property and Perfection, 84 Cornell L. Rev. 305 (1999)
Selected Judicial Citations:
Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. v. MUFG Union Bank, N.A., 41 N.Y.3d 462, 2024 WL 674251 (Court of Appeals of New York, February 20, 2024), concerning the UCC's choice of law provisions on the validity of a security, as applied to $9 billion in defaulted bonds issued by the national government of Venezuela