Recently, the Trust Indenture Act of 1939 has reappeared in out-of-court restructuring litigation. This piece of New Deal legislation was intended to prevent coercive restructurings whereby savvy institutional players took advantage of unknowledgeable or unengaged noteholders. Until recently,...

This article demonstrates that the Trust Indenture Act, a Depression-era statute governing bond indentures, cannot have been intended to prohibit debt restructurings like the one in Marblegate. In that decision, a federal court recently held that a debt restructuring violated the non-impairment...

The Trust Indenture Act prohibits a binding vote of bondholders to change any core term-principal amount, interest rate, or maturity date-of a bond issue. In this Article, I show how the prohibition on a collective action clause inhibits a troubled company's ability to reorganize outside of...

Chrysler entered and exited bankruptcy in 42 days, making it one of the fastest major industrial bankruptcies in memory. It entered as a company widely thought to be ripe for liquidation if left on its own, obtained massive funding from the United States Treasury, and exited via a pseudo sale of...

During the past century, three decision-making systems have arisen to accomplish a bankruptcy restructuring—judicial administration, a deal among the firm's dominant players, and a sale of the firm's operations in their entirety. Each is embedded in the Bankruptcy Code today, with all having...

This article responds to the question: "Capitalism: What has gone wrong, what needs to change and how to fix it" for a special volume on capitalism in Oxford Review of Economic Policy. Debates on capitalism get muddled by blind spots about essential institutions, particularly effective...

Chrysler, a failing auto manufacturer, was reorganized in a controversial chapter 11 in 2009. Financial creditors were paid a quarter of the amount owed them, while other creditors were paid more. The reorganization's defenders asserted, among other things, that the proceeding and the sale...

This paper critically examines the conventional view that the lack of fiduciary duty protections for corporate shareholders in civil law systems explains crucial differences in corporate structure and finance. It questions the thesis that the structure of civil law systems militates against the...