Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 14 of 14
Full-Text Articles in Law
The Rise In Elder Bankruptcy Filings And The Failure Of U.S. Bankruptcy Law, John A. E. Pottow
The Rise In Elder Bankruptcy Filings And The Failure Of U.S. Bankruptcy Law, John A. E. Pottow
Articles
Recent empirical legal scholarship on the consumer bankruptcy system has uncovered a marked rise in the proportion of elder Americans filing for relief under the Bankruptcy Code. But these studies have not probed the reasons behind that rise, an omission this Article seeks to address. Professor John Pottow and colleagues recently assembled the new dataset of the Consumer Bankruptcy Project (CBP), the largest national sample of consumer debtors in this country, which he uses to explore the sources of elder bankruptcy. The findings are both striking and ominous. While multiple factors, such as health problems and medical debts, contribute to …
The Nondischargeability Of Student Loans In Personal Bankruptcy Proceedings: The Search For A Theory, John A. E. Pottow
The Nondischargeability Of Student Loans In Personal Bankruptcy Proceedings: The Search For A Theory, John A. E. Pottow
Articles
In fiscal year 2002, approximately 5.8 million Americans borrowed $38 billion (USD) in federal student loans. This was more than triple the $11.7 billion borrowed in 1990. As a rule of thumb, tuition has been increasing at roughly double the rate of inflation in recent years. This troubling trend of accelerating tuition, coupled with the fact that real income has stagnated for men and increased only modestly for women over the past two decades, means that more and more students are going to need to turn to borrowed money to finance their degrees absent a radical restructuring of the postsecondary …
Private Liability For Reckless Consumer Lending, John A. E. Pottow
Private Liability For Reckless Consumer Lending, John A. E. Pottow
Articles
Congress recently enacted amendments to the Bankruptcy Code that possess the overarching theme of cracking down on debtors due to the increasing rate at which individuals have been filing for bankruptcy. Taking into account the correlation between the overall rise in consumer credit card debt and the rate of individual bankruptcy filings, the author nevertheless hypothesizes that not all credit card debt is troubling. Instead, the author proposes that the catalyst driving individual bankruptcy rates higher than ever is the level of "bad credit"-or credit extended to individuals even though there is a reasonable likelihood that the individual will be …
Greed And Pride In International Bankruptcy: The Problems Of And Proposed Solutions To 'Local Interests', John A. E. Pottow
Greed And Pride In International Bankruptcy: The Problems Of And Proposed Solutions To 'Local Interests', John A. E. Pottow
Articles
The collapses of Yukos, Parmalat, and other international juggernauts have focused scholarly attention on the failure of multinational enterprises. Even what one might consider "American" companies, such as Chicago-based United Airlines, have made clear in their restructuring plans that their operations have profound effects on the dozens of nations around the globe where they transact business. Government and quasi-government reform efforts to regulate these cross-border insolvencies have abounded, including among others, the UNCITRAL Model Law on Cross-Border Insolvency. UNCITRAL is also building on World Bank and INSOL efforts at promulgating a Legislative Guide for "best practices" bankruptcy codes. Scholars vary …
Abuse Prevention 2005, James J. White
Abuse Prevention 2005, James J. White
Articles
Today I do not debate the empirical question (what is the cause of the increase in bankruptcy filings?) nor do I address the buried moral question (who deserves the protection of bankruptcy law?). Rather, I speculate about the consequences of 2005 amendments to the Bankruptcy Code and about the reasons it will achieve or fail to achieve the goals of its sponsors. Along the way I hope to learn something about how law changes, or fails to change behavior.
The Totality Of The Circumstances Of The Debtor's Financial Situation In A Post-Means Test World: Trying To Bridge The Wedoff/Culhane & White Divide, John A. E. Pottow
The Totality Of The Circumstances Of The Debtor's Financial Situation In A Post-Means Test World: Trying To Bridge The Wedoff/Culhane & White Divide, John A. E. Pottow
Articles
Bankruptcy Judge Eugene Wedoff and Creighton Law School professors Marianne Culhane and Michaela White engage in a spirited debate over a series of law review articles about the proper scope of motions to dismiss a debtor's petition under section 707(b) of the freshly revised Bankruptcy Code. It is an interesting and provocative dialogue, with both sides advancing their respective positions persuasively. As a result, I find myself in the unfortunate position of wanting to agree with both. Since that is impossible, however, this brief article is my attempt to find a middle ground between their two positions. It does so …
Procedural Incrementalism: A Model For International Bankruptcy, John A. E. Pottow
Procedural Incrementalism: A Model For International Bankruptcy, John A. E. Pottow
Articles
The headline-grabbing business failures of late have brought increased attention to the relatively unresolved area of multinational bankruptcies. Parmalat, Global Crossing, and United Airlines are among the few international juggernauts that have foundered. In the financial meltdowns of these cross-border institutions, assets and creditors are dispersed throughout commercial environments that rarely end neatly at national borders. There has been heated debate, both in scholarly literature and the practical battlefield, over how best to resolve these transnational insolvencies, and there is nothing yet approaching a consensus. Reform efforts of various stripes have almost uniformly failed to gain meaningful international support. At …
Death And Resurrection Of Secured Credit, James J. White
Death And Resurrection Of Secured Credit, James J. White
Articles
The Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978 (the Code) posed palpable threats to secured creditors. It was drafted by a commission that was at least as concerned with the rights of debtors as with the rights of creditors. It was modified and adopted by a Congress that might have been the most liberal since World War II and signed into law by President Carter at the apogee of the left's power, two years before the Reagan election that marked the rise of the right and the beginning of the left's decline. The power of the left was exerted most forcefully on …
The Slippery Slope To Bankruptcy - Should Some Claimants Get A 'Carve-Out' From Secured Credit? No: It's A Populist Craving For A Petit Bourgeois Valhalla, James J. White
Articles
In 1996, Professor Elizabeth Warren made a proposal to the American Law Institute and the Drafting Committee for Article 9 for a “20 percent set aside” for unsecured claimants. As I understand it, her proposal would amend Section 9-301 of Article 9 (the section that now implicitly subordinates a lien creditor to a prior perfected secured creditor).
The Virtue Of Speed In Bankruptcy Proceedings, James J. White
The Virtue Of Speed In Bankruptcy Proceedings, James J. White
Articles
In my opinion the principal difficulty with Chapter 11 is that it gives strong incentives to various Chapter 11 players to distort the priorities that were intended by Congress.
Revising Article 9 To Reduce Wasteful Litigation, James J. White
Revising Article 9 To Reduce Wasteful Litigation, James J. White
Articles
For reasons that are unclear to me, the committees reviewing the articles of the Uniform Commercial Code and drafting revisions are congenitally conservative. Perhaps these committees take their charge too seriously, namely, to revise, not to revolutionize. Perhaps their intimate knowledge of the subject matter exaggerates the importance of each section and consequently magnifies the apparent size of every change. In any case, my own experience with two such committees tells me that the members quickly become focused on revisions and amendments that any outsider would describe as modest. To the extent that the revision of any of the articles …
Absolute Priority And New Value, James J. White
Absolute Priority And New Value, James J. White
Articles
This paper is based on a lecture given on December 6, 1990 ast the Second Annual Robert E. Krinock Lecture. The absolute priority rule is a specific application of the broader doctrine that reorganization plans must be "fair and equitable." Both have their origins in the railroad reorganization cases of the early 20th century. The general doctrine is now codified in section 1129(b)(2) of the Bankruptcy Code and the rule is codified in subsection 1129(b)(2)(B)(ii) which provides that the debtor must pay a nonconsenting class of unsecured creditors in full or "the holder of any claim or interest that is …
Taking From Farm Lenders And Farm Debtors: Chapter 12 Of The Bankruptcy Code, James J. White
Taking From Farm Lenders And Farm Debtors: Chapter 12 Of The Bankruptcy Code, James J. White
Articles
In passing Chapter 12 of the Bankruptcy Reform Act, Congress has effectively invalidated certain important provisions of existing farm mortgages. Equally significant, Congress has disabled farmers from granting binding mortgages on the full, value of their property. Although no court is likely to find the Chapter to violate the fifth amendment, the Chapter constitutes a substantial and retroactive alteration of the rights of existing mortgagees and a restriction on the powers of prospective mortgagors to grant valid mortgages. The thesis of this paper is that Congress was both wrong and shortsighted in its enactment of Chapter 12. Congress was wrong …
The Bildisco Case And The Congressional Response, James J. White
The Bildisco Case And The Congressional Response, James J. White
Articles
Section 365 of the Bankruptcy Reform Act authorizes one in bankruptcy to "assume or reject any executory contract ...of the debtor." The most frequent use of the section arises when a lessee goes into Chapter 11 and decides either to reject its real estate lease with its lessor or, if the lease is at a favorable rental rate, to assume it and assign it to another. A less frequent but more controversial use of section 365 is to reject one's collective bargaining agreement with his employees.