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Full-Text Articles in Law
Courts As Institutional Reformers: Bankruptcy And Public Law Litigation, Kathleen G. Noonan, Jonathan C. Lipson, William H. Simon
Courts As Institutional Reformers: Bankruptcy And Public Law Litigation, Kathleen G. Noonan, Jonathan C. Lipson, William H. Simon
Faculty Scholarship
This article compares two spheres in which courts induce and oversee the restructuring of organizations that fail systematically to comply with their legal obligations: bankruptcy reorganization and public law litigation (civil rights or regulatory suits seeking structural remedies). The analogies between bankruptcy and public law litigation (PLL) have grown stronger in recent years as structural decrees have evolved away from highly specific directives to “framework” decrees designed to induce engagement with stakeholders and make performance transparent. We use the comparison with bankruptcy, where the value and legitimacy of judicial intervention are better understood and more accepted, to address prominent criticisms …
Consumer Bankruptcy Pathologies, Edward R. Morrison, Antoine Uettwiller
Consumer Bankruptcy Pathologies, Edward R. Morrison, Antoine Uettwiller
Faculty Scholarship
This paper questions several long-standing descriptions of consumer bankruptcy in the United States. We focus on Chapter 13, which discharges debts after consumers pay disposable income to creditors for up to five years. Many studies document pathologies, including high failure rates, racial disparities, low creditor recoveries, and attorney biases. We observe the same patterns in new data drawn from Cook County, Illinois, but show that these pathologies are central tendencies that ignore substantial heterogeneity across consumers. Several pathologies are driven by subsets of consumers; some disappear once we take account of consumer heterogeneity. We present new evidence that some pathologies …