Plain English Movement, The Plain English Movement: Panel Discussion

One of the dominant events between 1975 and today in United States consumer law was the birth of what has become known as the plain English movement . For centuries lawyers have been derided for the nature of their prose. A word will not suffice where two or even three can take its place; long sentences are preferable to short ones; Latin, or perhaps medieval French, are preferable to English. The plain English movement is the name given to the first effective effort to change this and to write legal documents, particularly those used by consumers, in a manner that can be understood, not just by the legal technicians who draft them, but by the consumers who are bound by their terms. One can date the beginning of the plain English movement with some accuracy. On January 1, 1975, Citibank of New York introduced a plain English consumer promissory note. A team of businessmen, lawyers and language consultants had stripped the prior version, a dense and essentially unreadable document, of many substantive provisions and cleansed the remaining verbiage. Citibank knew it was on to something. The form was introduced at a major press conference which received television coverage. The note did indeed hit a responsive chord. It received national, and even international, attention. It was particularly welcomed by consumer activists who saw it as a major break- through in terms of consumer communication. Inevitably, a bill was introduced in the New York legislature requiring that Citibank\u27s contribution be mandated as a matter of law. The bill, in fact, referred only to promissory notes and provided that all such obligations would have to be written in the form of the Citibank note. Citibank, understandably flattered, nevertheless opposed the bill. Happily, it was not passed. The bill and then the law were highly criticized, indeed ridiculed, for the vagueness of the language standard. How can a draftsman know what is clear or coherent or common or everyday? What is clear to one (a lawyer, for instance) may well not be clear to another. If the standard were related to the understanding of a specialized group, the law could undercut its own purpose. Surely an already overburdened court system would become immobilized testing whether the words in consumer contracts were common and everyday. Thus did the critics attempt to make a mockery of the statute and reduce what was at least the germ of a good idea to nonsense. Why the statute did not glut the New York courts and how New York converted its contracts from legalese to plain English with minimal turmoil we will address at a later point

Business Divisions from the Perspective of the U.S. Banking System

The Bank Holding Company Act of 1956 ( Act ),\u27 as amended, most recently in 1999 by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act ( GLB ) divides all economic activity into five groups. These groups are: 1) banking, 2) activities closely related to and a proper incident to banking; 3) activities of a financial nature; 4) activities complimentary to those of a financial nature; and 5) activities not of a financial nature. This article will explore these five groups of activities separately. The policies behind the divisions will be analyzed and questioned whether they serve the policies behind the Act. This article will also question whether the divisions make good economic sense and whether they are drawn in a logical manner. Finally, this article examines the effects that the divisions have had on the banking industry, in both the United States and abroad, and looks to what they portend for the future

Business Divisions from the Perspective of the U.S. Banking System

The Bank Holding Company Act of 1956 ( Act ),\u27 as amended, most recently in 1999 by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act ( GLB ) divides all economic activity into five groups. These groups are: 1) banking, 2) activities closely related to and a proper incident to banking; 3) activities of a financial nature; 4) activities complimentary to those of a financial nature; and 5) activities not of a financial nature. This article will explore these five groups of activities separately. The policies behind the divisions will be analyzed and questioned whether they serve the policies behind the Act. This article will also question whether the divisions make good economic sense and whether they are drawn in a logical manner. Finally, this article examines the effects that the divisions have had on the banking industry, in both the United States and abroad, and looks to what they portend for the future

Role of the Bank for International Settlements in Shaping the World Financial System, The

The Bank for International Settlements ( BIS ) was set up in Basel, Switzerland in 1923 to handle remaining financial issues from World War II largely having to do with German reparation payments. It was the first of the semi-public international banks. Over the years its functions have changed and, largely since the late 1970\u27s, it has served as the situs for the world\u27s central banks and financial regulators to pool ideas and deal with international financial issues. A group of committees, com- posed largely of representatives of central bankers, now meets at BIS and has been issuing memoranda and drafts of regulations on a number of subjects affecting international banking. Among these are the regulation of capital, the management of international conglomerates, and problems resulting from electronic banking. Problems in world banking have sensitized observers to the absence of coordinated regulation and to the need for some form of unified control. That there is a need for one international bank regulators increasingly acknowledged. BIS comes closer than any other organization to fulfilling this function. The International Monetary Fund ( IMF ) comes close but is too politicized and has been too involved in attempting to meet a continuing series of crises to do any long range thinking. Only BIS has attracted the intellectual resources to analyze and resolve international problems in a thoughtful and deliberate manner. Only BIS output is being adopted in the world\u27s banking centers. BIS has been proposed as a world senior financial regulator. This article acknowledges the rationale for such a decision but argues that now is not the time for such an attempt. Banking is, of course, conducted locally even though its reach is international. To anoint any body as a senior regulator with the power to impose rules would require massive compromises among national regulators to achieve one central set of rules. It would also involve an abdication of measures of sovereignty by the constituent states. An effort of this kind would risk destroying the whole concept. Rather than start such a bold stroke at such an inopportune time, this Article argues that the international banking world would fare far better assisting BIS to proceed down the current track. As it continues to mature, and as its edicts are increasingly accepted throughout the world it will continue to approach its rightful place as the world\u27s bank regulator

Some Ruminations About Remedies in Consumer-Credit Transactions

The draftsmen of the Uniform Consumer Credit Code (herein- after the Credit Code) have thus far directed most of their time and effort to establishing a permissive pattern within which creditors give and debtors receive credit. Spokesmen for both sides, as well as distinguished neutral parties, have carefully described the terms under which credit may be granted, the rates that may be charged, and many other elements of the credit transaction. These statutory requirements will significantly influence the size and scope of the debtor community and will undoubtedly set the future pattern for consumer-credit transactions. Thus, these permissive, or authorizing, guidelines of the Credit Code are clearly its most important aspects. The object of this article is hardly to cover the entire field of creditor and debtor remedies. Instead, discussion is restricted to those civil remedies that apparently were considered most important by the draftsmen of the first tentative drafts of the Credit Code. Even here considerable selection has been necessary; the author\u27s personal interests have been the major guide

Is There a Dual Banking System?

There is a fierce controversy being waged today about the status of the historic dual banking system in American law. National banks (banks chartered by the national government) derive their powers from federal law. States, on the other hand, assert that they should be able to control certain aspects of national bank operations such as consumer protection written as state law. While the national banks acknowledge that states do have certain areas where they may control national bank activities--much contract law, for example, which is essentially state law--the national banks also assert a high level of authority--preemption--over the states where both national and state law have application. States assert that the degree of preemption claimed by the national banks is excessive. Our paper makes the point that this conflict is almost inevitable, given the existence of national and state banks operating in the same areas. The point of the paper is that the controversy has nothing to do with the so-called dual banking system and calling upon the name of the system to support either national or state bank authority is misleading and adds nothing to the argument. The paper goes on, however, and asserts that, given recent changes in both national and state law, the dual banking system does not exist at all in any meaningful way and resort to it clouds rather than illuminates the underlying conflict. The authors believe that national and state banks are really no more different from one another than are two national (or two state) banks. Statutes like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act of 1991 and the state “blue sky” laws are discussed in this context