Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Digital Commons Network

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 11 of 11

Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network

Fines, Fees, And Filing Bankruptcy, Pamela Foohey Jan 2020

Fines, Fees, And Filing Bankruptcy, Pamela Foohey

Scholarly Works

This essay was written in conjunction with the “Court Debt”: Fines, Fees, and Bail, Circa 2020 symposium held during the Association of American Law Schools' 2019 annual meeting. The essay details the extent to which "court debt" -- civil and criminal fines, fees, and interest -- can be dealt with by filing bankruptcy. In short, although filing bankruptcy on balance may help people deal with court debt and other debts, the barriers that people face to filing raise questions about the accessibility of civil courts and suggest that the consumer bankruptcy system itself is yet another place in which race …


Consumer Bankruptcy Should Be Increasingly Irrelevant--Why Isn't It?, Pamela Foohey Jan 2020

Consumer Bankruptcy Should Be Increasingly Irrelevant--Why Isn't It?, Pamela Foohey

Scholarly Works

This symposium piece is a response to Professor Nathalie Martin's Bringing Relevance Back to Consumer Bankruptcy. This response overviews the place consumer bankruptcy presently occupies in the United States. In doing so, it details why consumer bankruptcy remains relevant in the face of a socio-economic structure and of laws that suggest that bankruptcy may not be a particularly useful place for struggling Americans to turn to for help. The response ends by calling for a bolder vision for consumer bankruptcy in light of the shifting place of the bankruptcy system in America’s increasingly thread-bare social safety net.


Differential Treatment Among Creditors Under India's Insolvency And Bankruptcy Code, 2016: Issues And Solutions, C. Scott Pryor, Risham Garg Jan 2020

Differential Treatment Among Creditors Under India's Insolvency And Bankruptcy Code, 2016: Issues And Solutions, C. Scott Pryor, Risham Garg

Scholarly Works

This paper represents the results of an examination of the implementation of India's Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016 (IBC). This project included purposive sampling as well as interviews with resolution professionals, representatives of India's Insolvency Professional Agencies, and officials of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India. Analysis of this data identified three problems: 1. Vesting near-plenary control of the Corporate Resolution Insolvency Process (CIRP) with a Committee of Creditors made up of financial creditors has led to a perception of inequitable distributions between the classes of creditors. 2. The CIRP provisions of the IBC are inconsistent with public policy …


Debt In Just Societies: A General Framework For Regulating Credit, John Linarelli Jan 2020

Debt In Just Societies: A General Framework For Regulating Credit, John Linarelli

Scholarly Works

Debt presents a dilemma to societies: successful societies benefit from a substantial infrastructure of consumer, commercial, corporate, and sovereign debt but debt can cause substantial private and social harm. Pre- and post-crisis solutions have seesawed between subsidizing and restricting debt, between leveraging and deleveraging. A consensus exists among governments and international financial institutions that financial stability is the fundamental normative principle underlying financial regulation. Financial stability, however, is insensitive to equality concerns and can produce morally impermissible aggregations in which the least advantaged in a society are made worse off. Solutions based only on financial stability can restrict debt without …


Client-Focused Management Of Expectations For Legal Fees In Large Chapter 11 Cases, Nancy B. Rapoport Jan 2020

Client-Focused Management Of Expectations For Legal Fees In Large Chapter 11 Cases, Nancy B. Rapoport

Scholarly Works

Large chapter 11 cases can have fees that run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. That's one of the reasons that, in 2013, the Executive Office of the United States Trustee promulgated additional guidelines that affect legal fees in large chapter 11 cases. Bankruptcy courts have been appointing fee examiners and fee committees in large cases to aid the courts in their duty to ensure that the fees and expenses of estate-paid professionals are reasonable. I've been one of those people charged with helping bankruptcy courts review fees. As such, I've seen first-hand what happens when the professionals involved …


Using General Counsel To Set The Tone For Work In Large Chapter 11 Cases, Nancy B. Rapoport Jan 2020

Using General Counsel To Set The Tone For Work In Large Chapter 11 Cases, Nancy B. Rapoport

Scholarly Works

This Essay suggests that one way for the general counsel to help bankruptcy professionals make better staffing and budget decisions is to communicate her values more clearly to those professionals at the beginning of the engagement. In her role as the chief legal officer, the general counsel needs to let the bankruptcy professionals in on her thought processes. How does she watch over her own attorneys' decisions in other types of cases? What expenses does she consider reasonable? If she takes an active role in monitoring her bankruptcy professionals' work, her values (assuming that they're good values) will contribute to …


The Guardian Trustee In Bankruptcy Courts And Beyond, Lindsey Simon Jan 2020

The Guardian Trustee In Bankruptcy Courts And Beyond, Lindsey Simon

Scholarly Works

Litigation systems create dangers of unfairness. Citizens worry, and should worry, about exploitive settlements in aggregate litigation, potential biases in administrative proceedings, and troubling power imbalances in criminal trials. Public confidence in adjudicative processes has eroded to an all-time low. This Article explores the untapped potential of adding independent watchdog entities to address systemic threats to the integrity of government decisionmaking. These entities, which I call “guardian trustees,” do not fit within the traditional framework of our adversary system. Though guardian trustees already operate in bankruptcy proceedings, they have thus far received little attention in scholarly literature. This Article begins …


Driven To Bankruptcy, Pamela Foohey, Robert M. Lawless, Deborah Thorne Jan 2020

Driven To Bankruptcy, Pamela Foohey, Robert M. Lawless, Deborah Thorne

Scholarly Works

Over the last ten years, 15.1 million people filed for bankruptcy owning 16.4 million cars. These cars provided access to work, education, medical care, childcare, food, and other life necessities. They also were major household investments, the most expensive asset most bankruptcy filers owned other than a house. Using original data from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project, we document what happens to car owners and their car loans when they enter bankruptcy. In brief, we find that people who file bankruptcy own automobiles at the same rate as the general population, and that they overwhelmingly indicate that they want to use …


The Debt Collection Pandemic, Pamela Foohey, Dalie Jimenez, Christopher K. Odinet Jan 2020

The Debt Collection Pandemic, Pamela Foohey, Dalie Jimenez, Christopher K. Odinet

Scholarly Works

As of May 2020, the United States' reaction to the unique and alarming threat of COVID-19 has partially succeeded in slowing the virus’s spread. Saving people’s lives, however, came at a severe economic cost. Americans’ economic anxiety understandably spiked. In addition to worrying about meeting basic expenses, people’s anxieties about money necessarily included what might happen if they could not cover already outstanding debts. The nearly 70 million Americans with debts already in collection faced heightened anxiety about their inability to pay.

The coronavirus pandemic is set to metastasize into a debt collection pandemic. The federal government can and should …


Consumers’ Declining Power In The Fintech Auto Loan Market, Pamela Foohey Jan 2020

Consumers’ Declining Power In The Fintech Auto Loan Market, Pamela Foohey

Scholarly Works

Automobiles have become part of America’s infrastructure. For most people, having access to a car is crucial to their livelihoods and they will take on significant amounts of debt to purchase vehicles. Auto debt is unlike any other consumer debt, both in its structure, which allows creditors to easily seize collateral, and in its lack of regulation. The unique and lucrative nature of auto debt has not gone unnoticed by lenders or by companies leveraging fintech to offer people new ways to purchase cars and car loans. This Article assesses the evolving marketplace for auto sales, leasing, and loans to …


Claim Preclusion And The Problem Of Fictional Consent, Lindsey Simon Jan 2020

Claim Preclusion And The Problem Of Fictional Consent, Lindsey Simon

Scholarly Works

The doctrine of claim preclusion promotes fairness and finality by preventing parties from raising claims that already were (or could have been) raised in a prior proceeding. This strict consequence can be imposed only when the litigant received minimal due process protections in the initial proceeding, including notice and direct or indirect participation.

Modern litigation has caused a new problem. In some cases, a party may be precluded from ever raising a claim on the grounds of “fictional consent” to a prior court’s decisionmaking authority. Litigation devices have expanded the potential reach of judgments through aggregation and broad jurisdictional grants, …