Bankruptcy Law Commons^™

Teaching Amidst Transformation: Integrating Global Perspectives On The Financial Crisis Into The Classroom, Shruti Rana

Journal of Business & Technology Law

No abstract provided.

Bankrupting The Faith, Pamela Foohey

Scholarly Works

This Article presents the results of a comprehensive empirical study of religious organizations that filed bankruptcy under Chapter 11 from the beginning of 2006 to the end of 2011. It examines the institutions’ characteristics, reasons for filing, and case outcomes to investigate whether Chapter 11 is an effective solution to their financial problems. In investigating the religious organizations’ cases, the Article also assesses the role of bankruptcy courts in adjudicating Chapter 11 cases and places the cases within theories about the larger purposes of Chapter 11.

The study finds that the vast majority of debtors are small organizations that operate …

Contract Hope And Sovereign Redemption, Anna Gelpern

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Sovereign immunity has served as a partial substitute for bankruptcy protection, but it has encouraged a minority of creditors to pursue unorthodox legal remedies with spillover effects far beyond the debtor-creditor relationship. The attempt to enforce Argentina’s pari passu clause in New York is an example of such a remedy, which relies primarily on collateral damage to other creditors and market infrastructure to obtain settlement from a debtor that would not pay. The District Court decision, now on appeal before the Second Circuit, may not make holding out more attractive in future restructurings – but it would make participation less …

Re-Purposing The Dram Shop Law To Subordinate The Claims Of Reckless Bartenders Of Credit Drunks: In Bankruptcy, This One Should Be On The House, F. Stephen Knippenberg

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Should The "Undue Hardship" Standard For Discharging Student Or Educational Loans Be Expanded?, Kevin J. Smith

Barry Law Review

No abstract provided.

Paying Paul And Robbing No One: An Eminent Domain Solution For Underwater Mortgage Debt, Robert C. Hockett

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In the view of many analysts, the best way to assist “underwater” homeowners — those who owe more on their mortgages than their houses are worth — is to reduce the principal on their home loans. Yet in the case of privately securitized mortgages, such write-downs are almost impossible to carry out, since loan modifications on the scale necessitated by the housing market crash would require collective action by a multitude of geographically dispersed security holders. The solution, this study suggests, is for state and municipal governments to use their eminent domain powers to buy up and restructure underwater mortgages, …

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. …

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

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

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. …

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

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

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.

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 …

The Case For Public Pension Reform: Early Evidence From Kentucky, Maria O'Brien

Faculty Scholarship

Kentucky has managed to effect major changes to some of its pension plans in the face of poor funding ratios that threatened to swamp other budget priorities. At this point it is unclear whether the reforms are deep enough to bring the plans funding levels in line with those of “healthy” states like Wisconsin. It is also unclear whether there is the political will in other jurisdictions to curb costs by moving to defined contribution or hybrid cash balance vehicles. Transparency combined with a fear that pension obligations would soon swamp all other state budget priorities appears to have been …

Municipalities In Distress: A Preventive View, Tamar Frankel

Faculty Scholarship

The recent rising failure of municipalities has not produced the avalanche that some expected.¹ Yet concerns have been raised that the future will spawn more failures.² New York City and other municipalities face soaring pension, Medicaid, and retiree health care costs.³ New York City’s neighboring counties face similar challenges; Yonkers, Suffolk, and Nassau Counties each face their own set of fiscal problems.⁴

Municipalities that have failed, or are likely to fail, have raised a number of legal issues implicated by their inability to pay their debts. Some questions seem new. For example, are employees’ pension benefits …

Teaching Business Law Through An Entrepreneurial Lens, Michelle M. Harner

Journal of Business & Technology Law

The legal market has changed. Although change creates uncertainty and fear, it also can create opportunity. This essay explores the opportunity for innovation in the business law curriculum, and the role of simulation to help create more practice-aware new lawyers.

The Role Of The Imf In Future Sovereign Debt Restructurings: Report Of The Annenberg House Expert Group, Douglas G. Baird, Nicole Bollen, Lee C. Buchheit, Mitu Gulati, Anne O. Krueger, Fridrik Mar Balursson, Robert K. Rasmussen, David A. Skeel Jr., Sergei Storchak, Jeromin Settelmeyer

Faculty Scholarship

A meeting of international finance and insolvency experts was held on November 2, 2013 at the Annenberg House in Santa Monica, California. The meeting was co-hosted by the USC Law School and the Annenberg Retreat at Sunnylands. The goal was to solicit the views of experts on the implications of the IMF’s April 26, 2013 paper captioned “Sovereign Debt Restructuring -- Recent Developments and Implications for the Fund’s Legal and Policy Framework”. The April 26 paper may signal a shift in IMF policies in the area of sovereign debt workouts. Although the Expert Group discussed a number of the ideas …

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.

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 …

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 …