Law Commons^™

Shopping For Judges: An Empirical Analysis Of Venue Choice In Large Chapter 11 Reorganizations, Theodore Eisenberg, Lynn M. Lopucki

UF Law Faculty Publications

For almost two decades, an embarrassing pattern of forum shopping has been developing in the highly visible world of big-case bankruptcy reorganization. Forum shopping--defined here as the act of filing in a court that does not serve the geographical area of the debtor's corporate headquarters--now occurs in more than half of all big-case bankruptcies. Two jurisdictions have attracted most of the forum shoppers. During the 1980s, when a large portion of the shopping was to New York, the lawyers involved asserted that New York was a natural venue because of its role as the country's financial capital and because so …