Academic & Scholarly News

Consumer Bankruptcy Fee Study

09/01/12

I have just finished reading Lois Lupica’s paper on her impressive
consumer bankruptcy fee study. 
This is a model of what empirical, law-and-society research should be –
it combines data from electronic court records with focus groups and key player
interviews to give a textured understanding of the role lawyer’s fees play in
this particular legal system. 

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Cramdown and the Cost of Mortgage Credit

08/25/12

Joshua Goodman at the Harvard Kennedy School and I have a new paper out examining the impact of Chapter 13 cramdown on the cost and availability of mortgage credit.  Historically, when cramdown was permitted in some judicial districts prior to 1993 it was associated with a statistically significant, if small, increase in the cost of credit.

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Do Your Research, Ezra Klein!

08/21/12

Ezra Klein has joined the melee over the Obama Administration's housing policy failure with an apologia for the Administration.  Klein argues: 

The right question on housing, then, is not whether the administration’s policies proved insufficient. They did. It’s what would have been better. And that’s not a question that either Appelbaum or Goldfarb conclusively answer. It’s not even a question that the most credible critics of the Obama administration’s housing policies conclusively answer.

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The Tenuous Case for Swaps Clearinghouses

08/15/12

I've got a new short article out about swaps clearinghouses.  It's a response piece to an article by Prof. Yesha Yadav.

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Everything You Always Wanted to Know About CDOs (But Were Afraid to Ask)

08/13/12

Bill Bratton and I have a new paper out, called A Transactional Genealogy of Scandal:  from Michael Milken to Enron to Goldman Sachs.

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Bankruptcy Code in ePub and Kindle Formats

08/07/12

For readers putting together course syllabi in the bankruptcy area, this post is just a reminder that my able research assistant, Scott Cromar, and I put together ePub and Kindle versions of the Bankruptcy Code and Federal Rules of Bankruptcy Procedure. These versions are based on the public domain files available from the U.S. House of Representatives last December, and I intend to do a new version this December.

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Bankruptcy on the Bar

08/07/12

One of our recent grads tells me that the recent Texas bar exam had a question on bankruptcy law. That got me wondering how many states test bankruptcy law on their bar exam. Two minutes of searching around on Google did not reveal any others, but by then my limited attention span was exhausted.

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Why Don't Economists Read the Legal Literature?

06/26/12

When I read economics articles, I'm often struck by the absence of citations to the legal literature. Citations to legal works, even when very much on point, are frequently missing from literature reviews and citation lists. There are exceptions to be sure.  Some notable articles and scholars are cited routinely, and I've also noticed that economists will cite articles in some of the law & economics journals (like JLE and JLEO), but then economists also publish in those journals.

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Bankruptcy's Living History

06/13/12

The American College of Bankruptcy (ACB) in cooperation with the Biddle Law Library at the University of Pennsylvania has made available a great and often overlooked resource for scholars who prefer to study "law on the ground" instead of just the "law in the books." The National Bankruptcy Archives collects historical material regarding the development of bankruptcy, and

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Research Grants from NCBJ

04/30/12

As many readers of this blog will know, the Endowment for Education from the National Conference of Bankruptcy Judges has supported many research projects that have contributed to a better understanding of all sorts of issues involving debt and bankruptcy. Judge Dennis Dow, the current chair of the Endowment, contacted me and advised that it has a substantial amount of money available to make grants and is actively soliciting applications. If you are a scholar looking for support for the expenses connected with empirical research, the Endowment may be a great resource for you.

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