(1985)On June 2, 1897, the New York Journal famously quoted Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) as saying “The report of my death was an exaggeration”.   This widely quoted (and misquoted) denial was a riposte to a story that appeared the day before in the New York Herald about the author’s imminent demise.  I had a similar reaction to an e-Bulletin that I received yesterday from the Commercial Transactions Committee of the Business Law Section of the California State Bar announcing “Uniform Voidable Transactions Act Becomes Law”.

The e-Bulletin does accurately report that Governor Brown did sign SB 161 (Vidak).  The bill amends and renames California’s Uniform Fraudulent Transfer Act as the Uniform Voidable Transactions Act (UVTA).  As the name suggests, the UVTA is modeled on the model act adopted in 2014 by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL).  According to the NCCUSL, seven other states have adopted the 2014 model act (Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Carolina, and North Dakota).  Nevada considered adopting the model act, but the bill (AB 420) failed to pass.

According to the NCCUSL reporter for the model act, the amendments are less significant than those portended by the change in the name of the law:

But the renaming should not be taken to imply that the UVTA is a new and different act, or that the amendments make major changes to the substance of the UFTA.  Nothing could be further from the truth. The UVTA is not a new act; it is the UFTA, renamed and lightly amended.  The substantive changes made by the amendments, though significant enough to warrant attention, are, as just stated, light.

Kenneth C. Kettering, The Uniform Voidable Transactions Act; or, the 2014 Amendments to the Uniform Fraudulent Transfer Act, 70 The Business Lawyer 777 (2015).  The new California law doesn’t even make all of the changes effected by the model act.  A bill analysis prepared for the Assembly Committee on Judiciary by committee consultant Khadija Hargett is available here.

My cavil with the e-Bulletin is with the statement that the UVTA has become law.  In one sense, it has.  Yet, it is not quite law.  Under the California Constitution (Art. IV, § 8) the bill does not go into effect until January 1, 2016.  As the Court of Appeal has observed “The effective date [of a statute] is . . . the date upon which the statute came into being as an existing law.”  People v. McCaskey, 170 Cal. App. 3d 411, 416 (1985).  To make matters even more complicated, a bill can take effect and not yet be operative.  See Court Sorts Out California RULLCA Transition Muddle.