Why Was the Uniform Sales Act Adopted in Some States but Not Others?
Abstract: The Uniform Sales Act was an early attempt to unify American sales law. Between 1906 and 1947 it was adopted in 34 American states. Transaction cost theory suggests that states’ adoption decisions should have been influenced by large manufacturing interests, neighborhood effects, and major transportation systems. Historians have also suggested that states' adoption decisions should have been influenced by whether the states' legal professions had adopted a state bar association and whether the states had been admitted to the union. This paper uses a logistic regression model to evaluate the contributions of these variables to states’ adoption decisions. The results suggest that manufacturing interests, neighborhood effects, and transportation systems all played an important role in the diffusion of the Uniform Sales Act. It appears that the Act ultimately failed to diffuse across all states primarily because the southern states resisted legal unification and because most of them were not well integrated into the national transportation network.
