Sovereignty and sovereign immunity occur along a continuum. The kings and queens of old at one end; the North Hudson Sewerage Authority and its ilk at another. The need for a bankruptcy system to address financial distress varies inversely with a sovereign's place on the continuum. Queens and...

The absolute priority rule describes the basic order of payment in bankruptcy. Secured creditors get paid first, unsecured creditors get paid next, and only then do shareholders get paid, if at all. The rule has obtained a kind of unassailable, near scriptural status in the corporate...

Corporate debtors facing financial distress have a choice: file bankruptcy in their home jurisdiction or file in the United States. And some number of foreign corporations do file bankruptcy petitions in the United States.We expect this trend to increase in the coming years for two simple...

Among the collective wisdom about large corporate bankruptcy cases, the following points are almost undisputed: Longer chapter 11 cases cost more; Prepackaged chapter 11 cases cost less; Cases filed in New York or Delaware cost more; Fee examiners control the costs of big chapter 11 cases. But...

In this paper we focus on the concern that a preference for quick sales over traditional reorganization cases - which we see in both the United States and Canada - might allow the debtor's management to work with secured lenders to extract assets from the debtor in a way that would not be...

This paper studies the risk spillover among US Industrial Sectors and focuses on the connection between credit and liquidity risks. The proposed methodology is based on quantile regressions and considers the movements of CDS Industrial Sector Indices depending on common risk factors such as...

In prior work I have argued that the derivative “safe harbors” in the Bankruptcy Code should be either repealed, or at least greatly reduced in scope. This argument is based on the mismatch between the safe harbors and their stated goal – reducing systemic risk. But upon repeal of the safe...

In this paper our goal is to identify the core of corporate bankruptcy law that parties cannot achieve on their own, no matter how robust their contract law. Our approach takes organizational law as starting point and we posit that bankruptcy law is a necessary addition to organizational law....

For almost as long as there have been bankruptcy laws, there have been complaints that the primary beneficiaries of these laws are insiders who administer the bankruptcy system. In recent decades, this line of criticism has carried with it an implicit criticism of bankruptcy courts, who are...