This paper provides an account of the emergent phenomenon of ‘bankruptcy tourism' - forum shopping by debtors for favourable personal insolvency law - within the EU and with particular reference to England and Wales. After outlining the structural features of the European legal framework that...

Alarmed at the ease with which global bankruptcy jurisdiction can be engineered in the United States through a combination of the Bankruptcy Code's low bar to entry and the worldwide effects of a bankruptcy case, critics argue that the US promotes abusive bankruptcy forum shopping and harmful...

As is the case in several other jurisdictions, policymakers in the United Kingdom are seeking to adjust the bankruptcy laws to reflect ever increasing usage of the bankruptcy system by consumer debtors. This paper sketches the existing and emerging consumer bankruptcy systems in Scotland,...

Since the mid-1990s the number of consumer insolvencies in England and Wales has grown exponentially. The UK's Insolvency Act 1986 offers two formal responses to personal insolvency: bankruptcy and individual voluntary arrangements ('IVAs'). While consumers have used both these debt relief...

The decade since the financial crisis has witnessed a proliferation of various ‘light touch' financial restructuring techniques in the form of so-called pre-insolvency proceedings. These proceedings inhabit a space on the spectrum of insolvency and restructuring law, somewhere between a pure...

This paper is a follow up study commissioned by the UK Insolvency Practices Council which builds on our earlier study of complaints handling and disciplinary systems in the UK insolvency practitioner profession: see http://ssrn.com/abstract=1094757. For this study we compared the complaints...