Recent empirical legal scholarship on the consumer bankruptcy system has uncovered a marked rise in the proportion of elder Americans filing for relief under the Bankruptcy Code. But these studies have not probed the reasons behind that rise, an omission this Article seeks to address. Professor...

The Great Recession has brought greater sovereign debt defaults, which in turn have brought a surfeit of academic explorations and policy discussions of sovereign debt restructuring. The purpose of this article is to offer yet one more idea for the hopper of what to do with the seemingly...

International bankruptcy scholars well know the Maxwell case as probably the most important litigation precedent in this fledgling jurisprudential field. What they tend to know less about is the quot;back storyquot; of the redoubtable Robert Maxwell (born Jan Ludwick Hock). A towering,...

The legislative history of the 2005 revisions to the U.S. Bankruptcy Code has been well documented. Yet these revisions created a puzzle for political economists. If, as other scholars (mostly rightly) contend, American debtors enjoy lobbying power that would make their foreign counterparts...

Student loans are not dischargeable in personal bankruptcy proceedings in the United States. Why is that so? The answer to that question has remained largely unexamined in bankruptcy scholarship to date. Doctrinal and empirical pieces have sprouted up here and there (some quite good), but...

This article examines the stickiness of default rules and boilerplate terms in contract law. It argues that parties who choose to deviate from well entrenched defaults may face hurdles beyond the direct transaction costs of drafting. The mere deviation from standard terms by a proposing party...

A surprising number of courts believe that bankruptcy judges lack authority to impose criminal contempt sanctions. We attempt to rectify this misunderstanding with a march through the historical treatment of contempt-like powers in bankruptcy, the painful statutory history of the 1978 Bankruptcy...

This article is based on a February 2016 keynote address given at the University of Puerto Rico Law Review Symposium “Public Debt and the Future of Puerto Rico.” Thus, much of it remains written in the first person, and so the reader may imagine the joy of being in the audience. (Citations...

Those in the cross-border bankruptcy community hiding under rocks may not have heard about the monumental decisions in the co-trials in the Canadian-US Nortel bankruptcy proceedings. The decisions are thoughtful, innovative, practical, and important. They warrant a detailed case comment or two...

Soft law is on the ascent in international insolvency, seeming now to occupy a preferred status over boring old conventions. An arguably constitutive aspect of soft law, which some contend provides a normative justification for international law generally, is its "dialogic" nature, by which I...