Consumer advocates won a victory with the passage of the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009. (Credit Card Act). The Credit Card Act bans certain pricing practices that were confusing to credit card users. Ironically, the seeds of this legislative victory may...

Since the April 2005 passage of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA), companies have discovered that bankruptcy has become a quicksand of unexpected surprises that quickly forces companies into liquidation or forced asset sales under section 363 of the Bankruptcy...

Any choice of a state for a cross-border insolvency regime involves a trade-off between increased cross-border economic activity and application of less-preferred substantive insolvency law. A state may be relatively more dependent (‘dependent state') on the economy of another, less dependent,...

This article uses the case of the financialization of large law firms to develop debates about the process of the ‘capitalisation of everything' whereby financial logics spread both geographically between countries and sectorally from one industry to another. Drawing on work that analyses how...

The primary purpose for the doctrine of separate legal personality is to encourage entrepreneurship, by shifting the risks of business failure away from entrepreneurs to creditors and other risk bearers. Unfortunately this doctrine is subject to abuse by corporate controllers, which prompted the...

This article discusses the issues facing the lawyer for the estate in a bankruptcy case. It debunks the idea that the lawyer for the estate represents any single constituency, and it tries to redefine the fiduciary duties that the estate lawyer has to the bankruptcy estate

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...

Because theory suggests that businesses will wait too long to file voluntarily, current scholarship asks whether bankruptcy should offer larger rewards to managers and shareholders to induce them to file earlier. Although creditors could force firms into bankruptcy sooner by filing involuntary...

Since 1976, Congress has progressively amended the bankruptcy laws to treat some types of student loans differently from other unsecured debt. In 2005, student loans originated by private companies — loans granted only to credit-worthy individuals and risk-priced at origination — were added...

In this essay, we demonstrate that most ethics violations (at least the ones that irritate bankruptcy judges) are also violations of simple rules of behavior that people should have learned in kindergarten