Bankruptcy Law Commons^™

H.W. Johns - Manville, Steven P. Ingram, James K. Lam

Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Case Studies

No abstract provided.

Mississippi Chemical, Stacie Odencal, Jeremy Deese

Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Case Studies

No abstract provided.

Lessons From The Nextwave Saga: The Federal Communications Commission, The Courts, And The Use Of Market Forms To Perform Public Functions, Rodger D. Citron, John A. Rogovin

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

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 …

The "New And Improved" Chapter 11, Stephen J. Lubben

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Garnishment Restrictions And The Involuntary Chapter 11: Rethinking Kokoszka In A Means Test World, G. Ray Warner

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Supreme Court opinions often take on a life of their own, evolving into authority for a general proposition divorced from the factual and legal environments that gave them birth. The emerged proposition assumes a talismanic quality and becomes accepted as the meaning of the case. The proposition is extended and applied as a principle, without revisiting the opinion from which it sprang. A dramatic change in the background legal regime calls for a re-evaluation of such accepted principles and a return to their origins to determine whether, and to what extent, the emerged proposition still has validity.

An example …

Judicial Valuation Behavior: Some Evidence From Bankruptcy, Keith Sharfman

Faculty Publications

This Article presents an empirical study of judicial valuation in the bankruptcy context, focusing on twenty-four valuation disputes in which a bankruptcy judge reached a valuation outcome between the values contended for by the parties. Two main findings emerged from the cases studied: (1) bankruptcy judges on average allocated 65.2% of the value in controversy to debtors and 34.8% to secured creditors; and (2) bankruptcy judges were more than three times as likely to allocate most of the value in controversy to debtors as they were to secured creditors. These results lend empirical support to the behaviorist intuition that loss …

Take What You Can, Give Nothing Back: Judicial Estoppel, Employment Discrimination, Bankruptcy, And Piracy In The Courts, Theresa M. Beiner, Robert B. Chapman

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Global Venue Controls Are Coming: A Reply To Professor Lopucki, Samuel Bufford

Faculty Scholarship

This Article details my disagreements with Professor Lynn LoPucki's article "Global and out of Control" (79 Am. Bankr. L.J. 79). Part I discusses universalism and territorialism, especially the modified version of universalism that I support. Part II examines the international venue provisions of the Model Law and the EU Regulation. Part III introduces the relevant venue shopping cases. Only two groups of cases are relevant for the purpose of this paper: the French and German subsidiaries of Daisytek and Eurofood (a subsidiary of Parmalat SpA, the Italian conglomerate). None of the other cases that Professor LoPucki discusses was subject to …

Undue Hardship In The Bankruptcy Courts: An Empirical Assessment Of The Discharge Of Educational Debt, Rafael I. Pardo, Michelle R. Lacey

Scholarship@WashULaw

The discharge in bankruptcy embodies the policy that relief should be granted to an individual who has ceased to be economically productive by virtue of burdensome debt obligations (the fresh start policy). Once the debtor has been deemed eligible for discharge, forgiveness of debt is automatic, accomplished through legislative rule and its judicial enforcement. With regard to the discharge of educational debt, however, Congress has devolved the exercise of debt relief to courts. An obligation to repay such debt will be discharged if a debtor establishes that undue hardship would be suffered in the absence of its discharge. A court …

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 …

Financial Contracts And The New Bankruptcy Code: Insulating Markets From Bankrupt Debtors And Bankruptcy Judges, Edward R. Morrison, Joerg Riegel

Faculty Scholarship

The reforms of 2005 yield important but subtle changes in the Bankruptcy Code's treatment of financial contracts. They might appear only to eliminate longstanding uncertainty surrounding the protections available to financial contract counterparties, especially counterparties to repurchase transactions and other derivative contracts. But the ambit of the reforms is much broader. The expanded definitions – especially the definition of "swap agreement" – are now so broad that nearly every derivative contract is subject to the Code's protection. Instead of protecting particular counterparties to particular transactions, the Code now protects any counterparty to any derivative contract. Entire markets have been insulated …

How Law Affects Lending, Rainer F.H. Haselmann, Katharina Pistor, Vikrant Vig

Faculty Scholarship

The paper explores how legal change affects lending behavior of banks in twelve transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe. In contrast to previous studies, we use bank level rather than aggregate data, which allows us to control for country level heterogeneity and analyze the effect of legal change on different types of lenders. Using a differences-in-differences methodology to analyze the within country variation of changes in creditor rights protection, we find that the credit supplied by banks increases subsequent to legal change. Further, we show that collateral law matters more for credit market development than bankruptcy law. We also …

Bankruptcy Law And Inefficient Entitlements, Irit Haviv-Segal

ExpressO

The question as to the justification of bankruptcy law remains unanswered. The literature tends to emphasize the conflict and inability to compromise between the different normative outlooks of the insolvency law system. A deeper reflection on the existing theories of bankruptcy law reveals, however, that all theories share the same starting point: All theories share the understanding that efficiency considerations justify the enforcement of contractual bankruptcy arrangements. When the social theories call for increased levels of coercion and redistribution, these theories rely on normative considerations of distributive justice and rehabilitation values. They by no means rely on efficiency grounds. This …

The Explosive Global Growth Of Personal Insolvency And The Concomitant Birth Of The Study Of Comparative Consumer Bankruptcy: Consumer Bankruptcy In Global Perspective, By Johanna Niemi-Kiesilainen, Lain Ramsay & William C. Whitford (Eds.); Comparative Consumer Insolvency Regimes: A Canadian Perspective, By Jacob S. Ziegel, Kent Anderson

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Race Matters In Bankruptcy, A. Mechele Dickerson

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Bankruptcy And Mortgage Lending: The Homeowner Dilemma, A. Mechele Dickerson

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Race Matters In Bankruptcy, A. Mechele Dickerson

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Racial Dimensions Of Credit And Bankruptcy, David A. Skeel, Jr.

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Can A Bankrupt Company Assign Its Patent License To The Highest Bidder, Even When The License Itself Forbids Assignment? Why Everex Systems, Inc. V. Cadtrak Corp. Gives An Unconvincing Answer, Matthew D. Siegel

ExpressO

A patent licensee that declares bankruptcy will often want to assign its rights under the license to another party in exchange for much-needed cash. The Bankruptcy Code generally allows debtors to assign executory contracts, including patent licenses, in this way. Indeed, the Code permits debtors to assign a contract even if the contract itself contains a “no-assign” clause, i.e., a clause expressly forbidding assignment. But there is an exception: The Code will defer to certain kinds of otherwise applicable non-bankruptcy law that would normally prevent the contract from being assigned. In particular, the Code will not allow assignment by a …

Abandonments In Bankruptcy: Unifying Competing Tax And Bankruptcy Policies, Michelle A. Cecil

Faculty Publications

This Article attempts to resolve one such issue: the tax consequences of property abandonments by the bankruptcy trustee.

The A.H. Robins Bankruptcy, Jeb Gerth, Ed Meade, Ryan Russell

Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Case Studies

No abstract provided.

Self-Organizing Legal Systems: Precedent And Variation In Bankruptcy, Bernard Trujillo

Law Faculty Publications

Models of legal ordering are frequently hierarchical. These models do not explain two prominent realities: (1) variation in the content of a legal system, and (2) patterns of non-hierarchical ordering that we observe. As a supplement to hierarchical explanations of legal order, this Article, drawing from physical and social science research on complex systems, offers a self-organizing model. The self-organizing model focuses on variation in the content of legal systems and attempts to explain the relationship between that variation and patterns of ordering. The self-organizing model demonstrates that variation and ordering are not opposite categories, but rather constitute one continuous …

Sovereign Debt Reform And The Best Interest Of Creditors, William W. Bratton, G. Mitu Gulati

Vanderbilt Law Review

This Article is about boilerplate language located at the back of contracts drafted by the world's largest law firms. The clauses in question are process provisions that regulate the amendment of sovereign debt contracts. These paragraphs have been drafted and redrafted by generations of corporate lawyers, yet they have changed little in their broad outlines in more than a century of use. Now they take center stage in the global financial arena, where they govern billions of dollars (and pounds, euros, and yen) of sovereign debt in default and billions more in imminent risk of default. Officials, academics, and even …

Recent Developments In Bankruptcy Law, Nancy B. Rapoport

Scholarly Works

Discussion of 2004 cases regarding bankruptcy law.

Roundtable Discussion - Bankruptcy Reform: Then And Now, G. Ray Warner, Arthur Miller, Christine Dugas, Phil Corwin, David Skeel, Robert Feidler, Gerald K. Smith, Brady Williamson, Richard Levin, Elizabeth Warren, William Bodoh, Samuel Gerdano

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

G. Ray Warner: Good morning, welcome back. The final component of our program is this outstanding group of commentators, who will be able to bring us some fresh perspectives on the present, past and possibly even the future of bankruptcy reform. We are very fortunate today to have a collection of some of the people who were most instrumental in the creation of the current Code and also in the efforts that have been percolating through Congress recently to look at the Code again and to consider revisions.

I would like to thank the panel for their willingness to …

Derivative Suits In Bankruptcy, Keith Sharfman

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

It is a fundamental tenet of corporate law that creditors, unlike shareholders, may not bring derivative suits on a firm's behalf—even if the firm is, or is nearly, insolvent. Corporate law affords creditors who are unhappy with a corporate debtor's management various remedies, such as the right (in limited circumstances) to put the firm into receivership or to sue the directors and officers directly for breaches of fiduciary duty. But the derivative suit is not among them.

The formal rationale for denying derivative standing to creditors is that a derivative suit is an assertion of ownership rights, and (in …

On Proof Of Preferential Effect, Rafael I. Pardo

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Article presents a comprehensive analysis of the manner in which the trustee of a debtor's estate may satisfy his burden of proof to demonstrate the preferential effect of a prebankruptcy transfer from a debtor to a creditor. The proposed framework, if adhered to by courts, will create a uniformity that gives preference law its proper reach and thereby reinforces its primary goal: equal treatment of similarly situated creditors (the equality principle). After examining the historical developments that have made a trustee's evidentiary burden administratively less complex, the Article discusses the Ninth Circuit's decision in Batlan v. TransAmerica Commercial Finance …

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 …

Bankrupting Trademarks, Xuan-Thao Nguyen

Articles

The explosive growth of technology in the last two decades has vastly expanded intellectual property jurisprudence and elevated intellectual property to a heightened status in the marketplace. Indeed, a company's intellectual property assets may now be its most valuable corporate assets. Moreover, the property value of some trademarks is significantly greater than that of the trademark owner's physical assets.

The term “intellectual property” is commonly understood to include patents, trade secrets, copyrights, and trademarks. Yet a paradigm has been constructed and enforced over the last fifteen years wherein only patents, trade secrets, and copyrights are included. The paradigm specifically excludes …