452
Opinion of the Court
Commercial Code, for example, a security interest in after-acquired property is generally not considered perfected when the financing statement is filed, but only when the security interest has attached to particular property upon the debtor's acquisition of that property. §§ 9-203(1) and (2), 3 U. L. A. 363 (1992); § 9-303(1), 3A U. L. A. 117 (1992). And attachment to particular property was also an element of what we meant by "perfection" in New Britain. See 347 U. S., at 84 ("when . . . the property subject to the lien . . . [is] established"); id., at 86 ("[T]he priority of each statutory lien contested here must depend on the time it attached to the property in question and became [no longer inchoate]").5 The Bank concedes that its lien did not actually attach to the property at issue here until the McDermotts acquired rights
(the language of New Britain) becomes "nothing more to be done by the Bank to have a choate lien." Once one recognizes that the dissent's concept of a lien's "becom[ing] certain as to the property subject thereto," see post, at 457, 461, is meaningless, see n. 5, infra, it becomes apparent that the dissent, like the Bank, would simply have us substitute the concept of "best efforts" for the concept of perfection.
5 The dissent refuses to acknowledge the unavoidable realities that the property subject to a lien is not "established" until one knows what specific property that is, and that a lien cannot be anything other than "inchoate" with respect to property that is not yet subject to the lien. Hence the dissent says that, upon its filing, the lien at issue here "was perfected, even as to the real property later acquired by the McDermotts, in the sense that it was definite as to the property in question, noncontingent, and summarily enforceable." Post, at 457. But how could it have been, at that time, "definite" as to this property, when the identity of this property (established by the McDermotts' later acquisition) was yet unknown? Or "noncontingent" as to this property, when the property would have remained entirely free of the judgment lien had the McDermotts not later decided to buy it? Or "summarily enforceable" against this property when the McDermotts did not own, and had never owned, it? The dissent also says that "[t]he lien was immediately enforceable through levy and execution against all the debtors' property, whenever acquired." Ibid. (emphases added). But of course it was not "immediately enforceable" (as of its filing date, which is the relevant time) against property that the McDermotts had not yet acquired.
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