Since 1978, dismissals of involuntary bankruptcy petitions due to petitioning creditors' bad faith have proliferated. In the process, a textual oddity has not gone unnoticed: even as “bad faith” is denominated as the basis for an award of punitive damages, nowhere in the Bankruptcy Code's...

Master agreements typically include a range of different types of default and termination events. Given the numerous ways that a counterparty could become insolvent, it is important that market participants understand what would constitute an Insolvency Event with respect to theircounterparty...

The rapid growth of international economic activity in the recent decades has brought forth a unique and formidable policy challenge. The challenge consists of reconciling two goals which sometimes compete directly with one another: creating a regime that allows economic interaction between...

Establishing (e.g., perfecting) and enforcing a lien presents technical pitfalls and practical problems with which practitioners and courts are often unfamiliar or uncomfortable. After all, the law of liens requires an understanding of many different areas of the law, including the law of...

The current majority rule for handling the discharge of tax debt related to a tardily filed tax return is severely distorted and antithetical to sound bankruptcy and taxation policy. For years, it was established law that bankruptcy could discharge stale tax debts. Indeed, the Bankruptcy Code...

For more than two decades, a debate has raged over what to make of vindicatory contempts, a class of ostensibly civil contempt orders intended to punish a debtor for his or her defiance of prior judicial orders issued pre-petition by a state court. Because § 362(a)(1) applies to all judicial...

Municipal bankruptcies are unpredictable. There are several reasons for this statement — municipal bankruptcies are rare, involvement of the state itself in the process varies according to the governing state law, and chapter 9, the Bankruptcy Code chapter governing the municipal bankruptcy...

The recent global trends in personal bankruptcy policy – in particular, the European tendency to introduce discharge of consumer debt – represents a unique opportunity to have a second and deeper look at bankruptcy discharge and assess the effectiveness of the American debate on this topic....

Direct taxation of persons who receive distributions of surplus assets in the liquidation of Australian companies occurs under either the deemed dividends or capital gains regimes. Section 47 of the Income Tax Assessment Act 1936 (Cth) has deemed dividends for income taxation for over 80 years...