Consumer bankruptcy filings hit another record high in 1998, with nearly 1.4 million consumers filing for bankruptcy relief. This trend sparked a debate in Congress about means-testing chapter 7 bankruptcy filings. Proponents of reform argued that it would curtail fraud and abuse. Opponents...

This Article examines the issue of categorically nondischargeable debts in the Bankruptcy Code. These debts are excepted from discharge ostensibly because they indicate that the debtor incurred the debt through some misconduct, there is an important public policy at play that requires the debt...

Despite considerable litigation on the subject, there is little agreement as to whether courts must accept a "reliance argument" in bankruptcy fraud cases. This Article seeks to clarify the existing law and recommend changes to the governing statutes. The first three Parts of the Article serve a...

This Paper presumes that readers want to make bankruptcy more useful for consumers and for society as a whole. If this is true, we need to ask two questions: first, what do individual consumers hope to get out of the system, and second, what does society hope to get out of the system?Part I of...

This study examines the impact of changes in homestead exemption levels upon the consumer bankruptcy filing rate. This relationship is examined through the creation of an interrupted time-series multiple regression model. Regression analyses were implemented using several predictor variables to...

Defining failures and pathologies can be difficult. Finding and fixing them can be even more difficult. This is the main lesson of Morrison and Uettwiller's essay on Consumer Bankruptcy Pathologies (Morrison and Uettwiller, 2017). The essay is a major contribution to the literature on consumer...

In his 2009 State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama pleaded with Americans to support healthcare reform, stating, “This is a cost that now causes a bankruptcy in America every thirty seconds.” That jaw-dropping statistic was based on a study co-authored by Senator Elizabeth Warren...

In the last three years, household debt has risen by a third as disposable income declined. Declining interest rates, ease of access to credit for consumers and poorly regulated microfinance lending practices led to fast growth in consumer debt. Consumer lending in the banking and microfinance...