Bankruptcy Law Commons^™

Foreclosure Sales As Fraudulent Transfers, David G. Carlson

Articles

The Supreme Court has declared that noncollusive, regularly conducted foreclosure sales are not “constructive” fraudulent transfers voidable by a bankruptcy trustee Uniform state legislation ratifies this instinct for private creditor enforcements. But collusive or irregular foreclosure sales or sales that are intended to hinder, delay, or defraud creditors are subject to creditor attack, even though unsecured creditors are not proper parties to the foreclosure process. In such cases, unsecured creditors can cloud the title obtained from foreclosure in the cases of collusion, irregularity or fraudulent intent. This article examines precisely when foreclosure sales can be avoided by unsecured creditors of …

Generalized Creditors And Particularized Creditors: Against A Unified Theory Of Standing In Bankruptcy, David G. Carlson, Jeanne L. Schroeder

Articles

Courts have struggled toward a unified theory to explain when the trustee has exclusive jurisdiction to sue a third party for harms done to a bankrupt debtor, and when creditors have exclusive jurisdiction to sue the third party. Courts have proclaimed that when every creditor can sue the third party, then none of them can, and the right belongs solely to the trustee. Creditor rights are “generalized.” If only a proper subset of creditors can sue the third party, then the trustee is not able to subrogate to the subset. Such creditors are “particularized.” This paper proclaims the test a …

Fraudulent Transfer As A Tort, David G. Carlson

Articles

Fraudulent transfer law has historically been an in rem right of a creditor to property fraudulently received by a third party. In a minority of states, courts have treated fraudulent transfers as creating an in personam liability of the transferring debtor, the recipient, and any other third party who "conspired" with the transferor to achieve the transfer. This Article examines the wisdom of this modern trend and finds it wanting. The United States Supreme Court in 1861 was correct: fraudulent transfers are not wrongs. They merely create in rem rights.

Fraudulent Transfers: Void And Voidable, David G. Carlson

Articles

This Article explores the civil procedure attendant to private fraudulent transfer litigation (primarily outside the context of bankruptcy). In such litigation, courts ponder whether fraudulent transfers are void or voidable. In fact, they are both simultaneously! According to the theory "at law," a fraudulent transfer is "void." That is, a creditor with a judgment could simply levy the property from a fraudulent grantee as if the grantee had no property rights. This Article questions the constitutional viability of this ancient attitude. Meanwhile, "equity" viewed the transfer as voidable. The grantee gets title, but the title might be set aside. The …

Sfr Inv.’S Pool 1, Llc V. U.S. Bank Nat’L Ass’N, 135 Nev. Adv. Op. 45 (Sept. 26, 2019), Brittni Tanenbaum

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

When a court grants retroactive annulment for an automatic bankruptcy stay on a property, a sale of the property during the stay will not be set aside, unless it can be shown that fraud, oppression, or unfairness occurred during the sales process.

Modern Waste Law, Bankruptcy, And Residential Mortgage, Jill M. Fraley

Scholarly Articles

Around the time of the subprime mortgage collapse, lenders began in earnest to sue borrowers by adapting the traditional law of waste. Today, these claims continue to rise in frequency and to expand to more jurisdictions. Lender waste claims provide a “work around” for state mortgage laws that prohibit personal deficiency judgments after foreclosure and are potentially non-dischargeable in bankruptcy.

While a recent wave of scholarship has addressed the problems of how the bankruptcy system handles mortgages, scholars have not yet explored the use of waste actions by lenders and how waste judgments intersect with bankruptcy and foreclosure. Using new …

Limited Liability Property, Danielle D'Onfro

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Article offers a theory of secured credit that aims to answer fundamental questions that have long percolated in the bankruptcy and secured transactions literatures. Are security interests property rights, contract rights, or something else? Why do secured creditors enjoy a priority right that, in bankruptcy, requires them to be paid in full before other debt holders recover anything? Should we care that secured credit creates distributional unfairness when companies cannot pay their debts?

This Article argues that security interests are best understood as a form of “limited liability property.” Limited liability—the privilege of being legally shielded from liability that …

Limited Liability Property, Danielle D'Onfro

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Article offers a theory of secured credit that aims to answer fundamental questions that have long percolated in the bankruptcy and secured transactions literatures. Are security interests property rights, contract rights, or something else? Why do secured creditors enjoy a priority right that, in bankruptcy, requires them to be paid in full before other debt holders recover anything? Should we care that secured credit creates distributional unfairness when companies cannot pay their debts?

This Article argues that security interests are best understood as a form of “limited liability property.” Limited liability—the privilege of being legally shielded from liability that …

Insolvency Law As Credit Enhancement And Enforcement Mechanism: A Closer Look At Global Modernization Of Secured Transactions Law, Charles W. Mooney Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay revisits earlier work on the relationship between insolvency law and secured credit, the role of secured transactions law reforms, and the benefits of secured credit. These complex relationships require a holistic approach toward reforms of secured transactions law and insolvency law. Merely enacting sensible secured transactions laws and insolvency laws may be insufficient to produce the intended benefits from either set of laws.

The essay is informed by an ongoing qualitative empirical study of business credit in Japan—the Japanese Business Credit Project. The JBCP involves interviews of representatives of Japanese financial institutions and governmental bodies and legal practitioners …

Ln Mgmt. Llc Series 5105 Portraits Place V. Green Tree Loan Servicing Llc, 133 Nev. Adv. Op. 55 (Aug. 03, 2017), Wesley Lemay Jr.

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

If a homeowner that owns property in Nevada but declares bankruptcy in Texas and fails to list the Home Owners Association (HOA) as a creditor, the HOA cannot violate the automatic stay imposed by the bankruptcy and sell the property. If the property is sold in violation of the automatic stay, the sale is invalid. Under Ninth Circuit law, the sale is void ab initio while the Fifth Circuit holds that these types of sales are voidable, but can be approved by the bankruptcy court.

Bankruptcy Weapons To Terminate A Zombie Mortgage, Andrea Boyack, Robert Berger

Faculty Publications

Bankruptcy’s strongest public policy is the possibility of a fresh start for a borrower – a way for a debtor to free himself from the burdens of pre-petition obligations and re-commence his or her financial life. A debtor can surrender property burdened by a lien to the lien-holder and thereby release him or herself from ongoing obligations under the loan. This is true even in cases where the collateral’s value is less than the secured loan – for in bankruptcy, a lender’s secured claim is limited to the value of its lien. In chapter 13, a debtor who elects to …

Borrowers And Bankruptcy Trustees’ Unsuccessful Attempts To Avoid A Mortgage Under The “Splitting-The-Note” Theory, Alana Friedberg

Bankruptcy Research Library

(Excerpt)

In 1993, the mortgage industry created the electronic database Mortgage Electronic Registration System (“MERS”) in order to “track ownership interests in residential mortgages.” MERS “serves as the mortgagee in the land records for loans registered on the MERS System, and is a nominee (or agent) for the owner of the promissory note.” To date, MERS holds title to around 60 million home mortgages, about half of all home mortgages in the United States.

Borrowers and bankruptcy trustees have attempted unsuccessfully to argue a mortgage or deed of trust is void if a third party, such as MERS, was designated …

"We Buy Houses": Market Heroes Or Criminals?, Cori Harvey

Journal Publications

The residential sale/leaseback/buyback transaction is a socially beneficial foreclosure rescue transaction that is being regulated increasingly by the criminal courts to the detriment of the homeowners, investors, and society at large. Because the transaction is being regulated more aggressively with the criminal law, peculiar outcomes arise, which include investors being sentenced, in some cases, to draconian sentences --a trend that will eviscerate the transactions rather than improving them.

In calling for a retreat from that position, this Article makes both descriptive and prescriptive claims. The first descriptive claim is that the transaction is a beneficial one and that it has …

"We Buy Houses": A Foreclosure Rescue As The Solution To The Trapped Homeowner Equity Problem, Cori Harvey

Journal Publications

Foreclosure rescue transactions are viewed widely as scams designed, among other things, to dupe poor, minority, and elderly homeowners out of the equity in their homes. However, foreclosure rescue transactions come in many forms and, as an alternative to foreclosure, often maintain valuable options for homeowners that the homeowners otherwise would lose in the traditional foreclosure process. For this reason, many of these transactions, though imperfect, should be preserved and supported.

This Article introduces one such foreclosure rescue transaction, the residential sale/leaseback/buyback ("RSLB") transaction, into the legal literature from the perspective of the rescue investors. A basic RSLB transaction allows …

New Formalism In The Aftermath Of The Housing Crisis, Nestor M. Davidson

Faculty Scholarship

The housing crisis has left in its wake an ongoing legal crisis. After housing markets began to collapse across the country in 2007, foreclosures and housing-related bankruptcies surged significantly and have barely begun to abate more than six years later. As the legal system has confronted this aftermath, courts have increasingly accepted claims by borrowers that lenders and other entities involved in securitizing mortgages failed to follow requirements related to perfecting and transferring their security interests. These cases – which focus variously on issues such as standing, real party in interest, chains of assignment, the negotiability of mortgage notes, and …

Statutory Foreclosures In Arkansas: The Law And Recent Developments, Lynn C. Foster

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Paying Paul And Robbing No One: An Eminent Domain Solution For Underwater Mortgage Debt, Robert C. Hockett

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In the view of many analysts, the best way to assist “underwater” homeowners — those who owe more on their mortgages than their houses are worth — is to reduce the principal on their home loans. Yet in the case of privately securitized mortgages, such write-downs are almost impossible to carry out, since loan modifications on the scale necessitated by the housing market crash would require collective action by a multitude of geographically dispersed security holders. The solution, this study suggests, is for state and municipal governments to use their eminent domain powers to buy up and restructure underwater mortgages, …

Marital Property Annotated Bibliography, Nancy Levit

Faculty Works

This bibliography covers law review articles published, for the most part, after 2007. Articles for which the title is self-explanatory or that concern only a single case, state, or statute are cited, but not annotated.

Godzilla Lives! Or, Nonrecourse Carveouts Run Amok, Marshall E. Tracht

Articles & Chapters

The author of this article discusses two recent cases which deal with unconditional liability on nonrecourse carveouts and spring-ing guaranties. One potential consequence of these decisions: by essentially converting these contingent guaranties to unconditional guaranties, the threat of springing liability disappears and the guaranties cease to have deterrent effects. If the guarantor is li-able whether or not the single purpose entity files for bankruptcy, why not file? The result is likely to be bankruptcy filings and other "misbehavior" by borrowers. Moreover, the analysis used in these cases would put many performing loans into default along with triggering recourse, threatening substantial …

Take This House And Shove It: The Emotional Drivers Of Strategic Default, Brent T. White

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Morality Of Strategic Default, Brent T. White

Publications

No abstract provided.

Underwater And Not Walking Away: Shame, Fear, And The Social Management Of The Housing Crisis, Brent T. White

Publications

No abstract provided.

Single Asset Real Estate And Development Projects: The Kara Homes Mistake, Marshall E. Tracht

Articles & Chapters

The Kara Homes decision held that various affiliates of Kara Homes, Inc., each of which owned a separate real estate project, were "single asset real estate" ("SARE'') cases under the Bankruptcy Code's definition. According to the author of this article, the designation as single asset real estate substantially increased the difficulty faced by the debtors in maintaining their reorganization efforts, and has given lenders and their counsel a significant amount of comfort. However, the definition runs against the actual wording of the Bankruptcy Code, the intent underlying the SARE provisions, and the political winds. It should, and may well, be …

Publicity Rights As Moral Rights, David Landau, David Westfall

Scholarly Publications

Recent legal history has witnessed the creation of a large number of new forms of property. Consequently, judges and legislators have generally been willing to imbue these new forms of property with all or most of the attributes of traditional property. In this article we try to explain this trend by examining one important new kind of property, the publicity right. Publicity rights initially emerged in response to functionalist considerations: transferable rights were needed to keep pace with commercial custom. As time went on, courts began to expand the attributes of the right to new frontiers, such as inheritability. In …

"Sovereignty" Issues And The Church Bankruptcy Cases, David A. Skeel Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Muddy Property: Generating And Protecting Information Privacy Norms In Bankruptcy, Edward J. Janger

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Avoiding Moral Bankruptcy, David A. Skeel Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

Faced with hundreds of clergy sexual misconduct cases last year, the Archdiocese of Boston hinted that it was considering filing for bankruptcy. Although it is hard to imagine an archdiocese or church filing for bankruptcy, bankruptcy has become an important forum for many social issues that cannot be easily resolved elsewhere. This Article explores the implications of a religious organization bankruptcy filing by focusing on four problems with the bankruptcy alternative: the possibility of dismissal for being filed in bad faith; the question of what church assets are subject to the process; the fact that the church might be subject …

From Jeans To Genes: The Evolving Nature Of Property Of The Estate, A. Mechele Dickerson

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Tax Consequences Of Abandonment Under The Bankruptcy Code, Jack F. Williams

Faculty Publications By Year

No abstract provided.

Of Hotel Revenues, Rents, And Formalism In The Bankruptcy Courts: Implications For Reforming Commercial Real Estate Finance, R. Wilson Freyermuth

Faculty Publications

This article is intended to continue the dialogue begun by the proposed Restatement and has two distinct goals in this effort. Parts I through III argue that the position of the Restatement drafters is both legally and functionally sound and that bankruptcy courts should embrace and apply the proposed Restatement in administering distressed real estate developments. Part I reviews the reasoning articulated in the hotel bankruptcy cases, demonstrating how courts have applied the provisions of the Bankruptcy Code and state law in a formalistic manner to extinguish the hotel mortgagee's lien upon postpetition room revenues. Part II rejects the analysis …