As is well-known, the Affordable Care Act (“ACA”) is an incredibly hot political issue across the country. The ACA was originally proposed in large measure due to the destruction that outstanding medical bills can have on family finances. Most of the existing legal scholarship on medical...

The debtor-creditor relationship has always been intertwined with notions of morality. Failing to pay one's financial obligations has traditionally been met with social opprobrium, internal shame, and external stigma. This dynamic did not change with the advent of American bankruptcy law....

When Congress amended the Bankruptcy Code in 2005 through the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA), it mandated that individual consumer debtors undergo two debtor education courses, one as a condition precedent to filing for bankruptcy relief, and a second for later...

Since the Middle Ages, bankruptcy laws have been concerned with preventing and deterring fraudulent debtors, most notably debtors who willfully fail to fully disclose all of their assets to their creditors. This concern was no less prevalent during the passage of the first Bankruptcy Act in the...

Most individual debtors file for bankruptcy relief with honest intentions. Nonetheless, there is also an underside to the American bankruptcy law system that often goes unreported and ignored in the scholarly literature, namely, the commission of fraud by debtors who seek protection under the...

For as long as the institution of bankruptcy has existed, legal commentators have debated whether it is appropriate for debtors to experience some social stigma upon filing for personal bankruptcy - that is, whether it serves the goals of bankruptcy law for debtors to feel shame. While this...