Law Commons^™

Bankruptcy Policymaking In An Imperfect World, Elizabeth Warren

Michigan Law Review

This essay is about bankruptcy policy. It attempts to articulate a comprehensive statement about the various and competing goals that underlie the bankruptcy system. The essay offers both a positive observation, drawn from the Code and its operation, and a normative evaluation, designed to outline the difficult value judgments that comprise the bankruptcy system. It also serves warning: before commentators propose any sweeping changes or policymakers take seriously any suggestions to scrap the system, they must consider the impact of such proposals on a number of competing normative goals.

The Fantastic Wisconsylvania Zero-Bureaucratic-Cost School Of Bankruptcy Theory: A Comment, James W. Bowers

Michigan Law Review

In two recently published articles, Wisconsin Law Professor Lynn LoPucki and Pennsylvania Law Professor Elizabeth Warren, nearly simultaneously, fired the latest shots in one of academia's hottest ongoing debates: whether any good reason for having bankruptcy law exists. Justice Holmes once opined that the future belonged to the lawyer skilled in statistics and economics. LoPucki and Warren apparently agree about statistics but argue that, in a world with positive transaction costs, economic theory has little to contribute to our understanding about the justifications for bankruptcy law.

I write to highlight what one might easily overlook in LoPucki's and Warren's pieces. …