An Open Letter to Law School Deans About the Importance of Commercial Law Education Miscellaneous
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Recommended Citation
Anthony Palermo et al., An Open Letter to Law School Deans About the Importance of Commercial Law Education (2026)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
The American Bar Association's Commercial Law Education Task Force was formed to bring renewed attention to the importance of commercial law in legal education. There has been a significant decline in commercial law course offerings at U.S. law schools, and we write to law schools to ask them to prioritize and encourage commercial law offerings.
Commercial law cuts across disciplines and includes selling, leasing, lending, investing, and payments. Commercial law concepts appear regularly and substantially in a variety of practices, including not only transactional and business litigation fields but also practices focused on consumer law, family law, bankruptcy, and criminal law. Commercial law forms the basis for understanding our existing systems of finance and trade and informs developing systems such as cryptocurrency.
Despite its significance, commercial law is disappearing from law school curricula. In addition, Secured Transactions will no longer be directly tested on the NextGen Uniform Bar Exam.
We are a robust community of more than 200 law professors and practitioners who are dedicated to ensuring that commercial law classes remain in law school curricula. We urge law schools to make it a priority to offer these courses, including those covering secured transactions, sales and leases of goods, payment systems, bankruptcy, or some combination of these, plus additional courses in transactional skills, cryptocurrencies and other digital assets, international trade, consumer finance, and the like. Of these classes, retaining and promoting Secured Transactions is our priority.
