Professor Morris Shanker.

• Author: Shea-Stonum, Marilyn
• Position: Tribute to Professor Morris Shanker - Testimonial

Reflecting on the career of Case Western Reserve University's ("CWRU") John Homer Kapp Professor of Law Morris G. Shanker gives me the opportunity to say thank you to a scholar who, I have come to realize, was not only an excellent teacher but also a considerable force in defining the U.S. commercial legal system. As a bankruptcy practitioner and now as a bankruptcy judge, I have functioned in this system throughout my legal career and gained increasing insight into his influence on commercial and bankruptcy laws in the United States, contributions that swell far beyond the CWRU lecture halls.

When I first enrolled in Professor Shanker's Secured Transactions course as a second-year law student, I lacked any perspective on the significance of the subject matter and any realization of how privileged CWRU students were to be studying with someone who was present at the sculpting of significant portions of the Uniform Commercial Code (the "UCC"). By the end of the course, I had a dim understanding of the enormous contribution that the UCC brought to the stability of U.S. commerce and law. This stability was the goal and the accomplishment of Grant Gilmore and a small tribe of theorists and draftsmen, including Prof. Shanker, who worked through the American Law Institute to produce and then polish the UCC through amendments in 1972.

Appropriate to his subject matter, Prof. Shanker's teaching style was straightforward and not littered with war stories of the innumerable debates that had to be settled in amending the UCC. (1) Instead, he recognized that his assignment in the classroom was to immerse his students in the UCC's structure and provisions. He certainly succeeded in impressing on us the UCC's central importance to the work of any practicing lawyer. On a few occasions, he might note an article that he had authored on one significant topic or another, (2) but his lasting gift as a teacher is the clarity he brought to the provisions of the UCC and the legal environment that it created.

Ironically, I did not take his bankruptcy course before I graduated in 1975. Five years later when I was on maternity leave from my emerging practice in commercial litigation and bankruptcy, I had the good sense to cure that omission by auditing Prof. Shanker's bankruptcy course. By then I had some first-hand experience with bankruptcy or, as I have come to regard it, the acid test for commercial transaction structuring. The delay afforded me the opportunity...