Professor Neil Cohen featured in the Current Issue of The ALI Reporter

Professor Neil Cohen, an expert in international commercial law, is the subject of the Member Spotlight in the winter issue of The ALI Reporter, the quarterly newsletter of the American Law Institute. In a Q&A, Cohen discusses how he first became interested in commercial law, his experience studying and applying the rules and principles of the Uniform Commercial Code, and his work as a reporter on significant ALI projects.

Cohen currently serves as co-reporter on the Institute’s newest project (and first-ever collaboration with the European Law Institute), Principles for a Data Economy. The project will study, identify, and collate a common set of legal principles governing transactions in the newest major component of the international economy—data that is traded as a commodity. Vice Dean Christina Mulligan, whose scholarship addresses efforts to adapt intellectual property law for the digital age, was invited by ALI to serve as an adviser on the project.

“In this Principles project, we’re doing the best we can to adapt those venerable principles to this new field,” Cohen said. “We are thinking not only about what the current legal rules are but what the rules of the future could or should be, especially for a segment of the economy in which transactions cross borders with ease.”

Cohen also serves as an adviser on ALI’s Restatement of the Law Third, Conflict of Laws. He previously served as reporter for the Institute’s Restatement of the Law Third, Suretyship and Guaranty, and he held the endowed reporter’s chair, the R. Ammi Cutter Reporter. He serves as the Director of Research of the Permanent Editorial Board for the Uniform Commercial Code and has been a member of several drafting committees for revising various articles of the UCC, including the most recent revisions of Articles 1, 3, 8, and 9, and was Reporter for the complete revision of Article 1 completed in 2001.

“While I was practicing commercial law, the world of commerce was changing all around us because that’s the nature of innovation,” Cohen said. “As a result, when I went into academia…I was able to see that some of the rules that I thought were modern and cutting-edge were actually falling behind the developments of commerce and technology.”

In 2014, ALI presented Professor Cohen with the John Minor Wisdom Award, given in recognition of a member’s contributions to the work of the Institute.

Read the Q&A here.

Watch the video of his acceptance speech here.