Bankruptcy Law Commons^™

Securitization, Structured Finance, And Covered Bonds, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

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

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Ring-Fencing, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

“Ring-fencing” is often touted as a regulatory solution to problems in banking, finance, public utilities, and insurance. However, both the precise meaning of ring-fencing, as well as the nature of the problems that ring-fencing regulation purports to solve, are ill defined. This article examines the functions and conceptual foundations of ring-fencing. In a regulatory context, the term can best be understood as legally deconstructing a firm in order to more optimally reallocate and reduce risk. So utilized, ring-fencing can help to protect public-benefit activities performed by private-sector firms, as well as to mitigate systemic risk and the too-big-to-fail problem inherent …

Bankruptcy Trusts, Transparency And The Future Of Asbestos Compensation, S. Todd Brown

Journal Articles

As we enter the fifth decade of asbestos personal injury litigation, much of the debate over its immediate future centers on the operations of bankruptcy trusts and their relationship to the tort system. Roughly 100 companies have entered bankruptcy as a result of their unsustainable asbestos liabilities, and, from these bankruptcies, approximately 60 trusts have been established or are in the process of being established. Some critics contend that the trust system is plagued by fraud and abuse; allowing plaintiffs' lawyers to obtain compensation from the trusts for fraudulent claims and to evade relevant discovery obligations under applicable state law. …

Panel Iii: Politics And The Public In Ip & Info Law Policy Making, Michael J. Burstein, Derek Khanna, Jessica Littnan, Sherwin Siy, Richard S. Whitt

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Protecting The Innocent - The Need To Adapt Federal Asset Forfeiture Laws To Protect The Interests Of Third Parties In Digital Asset Seizures, Elizabeth Friedler

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Health And Financial Fragility: Evidence From Car Crashes And Consumer Bankruptcy, Edward R. Morrison, Arpit Gupta, Lenora M. Olson, Lawrence Cook, Heather Keenan

Faculty Scholarship

This paper assesses the importance of adverse health shocks as triggers of bankruptcy filings. We view car crashes as a proxy for health shocks and draw on a large sample of police crash reports linked to hospital admission records and bankruptcy case files. We report two findings: (i) there is a strong positive correlation between an individual's pre-shock financial condition and his or her likelihood of suffering a health shock, an example of behavioral consistency; and (ii) after accounting for this simultaneity, we are unable to identify a causal effect of health shocks on bankruptcy filing rates. These findings emphasize …

Economics Of Bankruptcy – Introduction, Edward R. Morrison

Faculty Scholarship

This essay surveys important contributions to the economics of bankruptcy. It is an introductory chapter for a forthcoming volume (from Edward Elgar Press) that compiles the work of legal scholars as well as economists working in the field of corporate finance. The essay begins with the foundational theories of Baird, Jackson, and Rea and then collects scholarly work extending, testing, or revising those theories. At various points I identify questions that merit further study, particularly empirical testing.

Improving The Lives Of Individuals In Financial Distress Using A Randomized Control Trial: A Research And Clinical Approach, Lois R. Lupica, Dalie´ Jimenez, D. James Greiner, Rebecca L. Sandefur

Faculty Publications

This Article describes an ambitious Randomized Control Trial (RCT) in the area of consumer debt collection. Randomized trials are the same kind of evaluation that the law requires (or at least strongly encourages) before new drugs and medical devices may be sold to the public. Although they have not yet gained widespread popularity in the evaluation of legal systems, randomized trials are uniquely effective ways of assessing whether any benefits observed after implementation of legal or educational assistance programs are really due to those programs as compared to other factors, such as unusual levels of competence or motivation of program …

Fee Effects, Kathryn Judge

Faculty Scholarship

Intermediaries are a pervasive feature of modern economies. This article draws attention to an under-theorized cost arising from the use of specialized intermediaries – a systematic shift in the mix of transactions consummated. The interests of intermediaries are imperfectly aligned with the parties to a transaction. Intermediaries seek to maximize their fees, a transaction cost from the perspective of the parties. Numerous factors, including the requirement that a transaction create value in excess of the associated fees to proceed and an intermediary’s interest in maintaining a good reputation, constrain an intermediary’s tendency to use its influence in a self-serving manner. …

Revisiting Sovereign Bankruptcy, Lee C. Buchheit, Anna Gelpern, Mitu Gulati, Ugo Panizza, Beatrice Weder Di Mauro, Jeromin Zettelmeyer

Faculty Scholarship

Sovereign debt crises occur regularly and often violently. Yet there is no legally and politically recognized procedure for restructuring the debt of bankrupt sovereigns. Procedures of this type have been periodically debated, but so far been rejected, for two main reasons. First, countries have been reluctant to give up power to supranational rules or institutions, and creditors and debtors have felt that there were sufficient instruments for addressing debt crises at hoc. Second, fears that making debt easier to restructure would raise the costs and reduce the amounts of sovereign borrowing in many countries. This was perceived to be against …

California Dreaming: The California Secure Choice Retirement Savings Trust Act, Edward A. Zelinsky

Articles

Half of American workers are not covered by employer-sponsored retirement arrangements. The recently passed California Secure Choice Retirement Savings Trust Act seeks to solve this problem by mandating retirement savings arrangements for California employers, coupled with a public investment vehicle for investing these private retirement savings. The Act is important because of California’s size and status as a trendsetter for other states.

This Article is the first to examine the important legal questions the Act raises under the Internal Revenue Code and ERISA. Contrary to the drafters’ intent, the savings accounts authorized under the Act do not qualify as individual …

Critique Of Money Judgment Part Three: Restraining Notices, David G. Carlson

Articles

New York is virtually unique in permitting lawyers to issue court orders restraining debtors and third parties from conveying away any assets that could be used to satisfy a money judgment. In effect, these orders command the recipient to do nothing, whereas a turnover or garnishment orders the recipient to do something — pay the creditor or sheriff or surrender illiquid property to the sheriff. The weakness and strength of this debt collection tool is assessed at length. The Article also analyzes in detail New York’s Exempt Income Protection Act, enacted in 2008 to force banks to protect the exempt …

Ask The Professor: How Will The Seventh Circuit Rule In Sentinel Ii?, Ronald H. Filler

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Water Bankruptcy, Christine A. Klein

UF Law Faculty Publications

Many western states are on the verge of bankruptcy, with debts exceeding assets. And yet, they continue to take on additional debt through contracts and other commitments. Although this distress sounds like an outgrowth of the 2008 recession, this crisis involves water, not money. In particular, the problem concerns the western prior appropriation system of water law, which allocates the right to use water under the priority principle of “first in time, first in right.” In many states, the system is so “over-allocated” that it promises to deliver annually much more water than nature provides. The crisis will deepen as …

Cross-Border Insolvency Problems: Is The Uncitral Model Law The Answer?, S. Chandra Mohan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This paper examines the impact that the UNCITRAL Model Law on Cross-border Insolvency has had on States in the light of the central problems often associated with transnational insolvencies. Despite the accolades that it has received, the Model Law has been adopted in only 19 countries in the last 15 years and that too in many different ways. If the number of adoptees and the rather conditional acceptance of the Model Law’s provisions represent a lack of international enthusiasm for adopting the Model Law, what are the reasons for this? The paper concludes by asking whether the UNCITRAL Model Law …

Rejection Of Nonresidential Leases Of Real Property In Bankruptcy: What Happens To The Mortgagee's Security Interest? , William E. Winfield

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Standing To Sue A Carrier's Killers , Davis J. Howard

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Broke But Not Bankrupt: Consumer Debt Collection In State Courts, Richard M. Hynes

Florida Law Review

Virginia, with a population of about seven million, has averaged more than a million civil filings a year since the late 1980s. The overwhelming majority of these filings seek to collect debts from consumers, and most judgments go unpaid. Despite this apparent insolvency, civil litigation appears to be only tenuously related to consumer bankruptcy whether one looks at Virginia or at the nation as a whole. Nationally, the non-business bankruptcy filing rate rose by more than 350% between 1980 and 2002, while the civil filing rate rose by about 12%. Prior research suggests that relatively few bankrupt debtors have been …

The New Value Exception To The Absolute Priority Rule In Chapter 11 Reorganizations: What Should The Rule Be? , Linda J. Rusch

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.