Corporate reorganization under Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code is built on the foundation of the absolute priority rule, which requires that senior creditors be paid in full before any value can be distributed to junior creditors. The standard law and economics understanding is that absolute...

In RadLAX Gateway Hotel, LLC v Amalgamated Bank, the Supreme Court's statutory interpretation focuses on an emerging theme of its bankruptcy jurisprudence: the proper domain of the bankruptcy judge. While one might expect the Court to approach that question of domain as it has for administrative...

Bankruptcy scholarship is largely a debate about the comparative merits of a mandatory regime on one hand and bankruptcy by free design on the other. By the standard account, the current law of corporate reorganization is mandatory. Various rules that cannot be avoided ensure that investors'...

This article provides a framework for analyzing side agreements in corporate bankruptcy, such as intercreditor and “bad boy” agreements. These agreements are controversial because they commonly include a promise by one party to remain silent – to waive some procedural right they would...

In this Article, we explore a central problem facing creative industries: how to organize collaborative creative production? We identify informal rules as a significant and pervasive — but nonetheless overlooked — tool for solving that problem. While existing literature has focused on the...

During the height of the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009, the government bailed out numerous corporations, including banks, investment banks, and automobile manufacturers. While the bailouts helped end the financial crisis, they were intensely controversial at the time, and were marred by the...

This Article reconsiders the implementation of Article III in the bankruptcy context. Recent rulings limiting the delegation of adjudicative power to non-Article III tribunals have generated only uncertainty and a profusion of litigation. The reason for this is that the Court's Article III cases...

A fundamental question for corporate bankruptcy law is why it exists in the first place. To put it another way, why do we have special rules that apply only in financial distress? The conventional law-and-economics answer—known as the Creditors' Bargain Theory—identifies two core purposes of...

Law has always strived for accurate contextualization, but only with recent technological advances in data processing and communication has this goal become meaningfully achievable at the personal level. While the other essays in this Symposium explore the costs and benefits of personalizing...

Many current bankruptcy debates—from critical vendor orders to the Supreme Court's decision last year in Czyzewski v. Jevic Holding Corporation—begin with bankruptcy's distributional rules and questions about how much discretion a judge should have in applying them. It is a mistake, however,...