Seeing the Intangible: Juliet Moringiello's Enduring Legacy in Property Law

Professor Juliet Moringiello was a pioneering voice in reimagining property law for the digital age, advocating for a functional approach that transcended traditional requirements related to tangibility long before such thinking became mainstream in legal scholarship. Her groundbreaking 2007 article The (Ir)relevance of (In)tangibility presciently argued that the legal system's fixation on physical versus intangible distinctions created false categories unrelated to significant legal distinctions that hindered commercial law's ability to accommodate electronic assets like domain names and, eventually, digital assets. This essay examines how Professor Moringiello's early insights laid the intellectual foundation for the revolutionary 2022 Amendments to the Uniform Commercial Code that established controllable electronic records as a new category of personal property. Her pragmatic, policy-oriented methodology not only anticipated the legal challenges posed by Bitcoin, NFTs, and other digital assets but also provided the theoretical framework that enabled American commercial law to evolve functionally rather than be constrained by historical formalism. As such, her work was instrumental in bridging the gap between centuries-old property concepts and twenty-first-century technologies.