Bankruptcy Generally

I’m on my way to the Choice of Law in Cross-Border Bankruptcy Cases symposium at Brooklyn Law School that Susan Block-Lieb mentioned in her post earlier this week, so I have Chapter 15 on the brain.

Get it?

Anyway, Law v. Siegel is now out, with a 9-0 opinion that shouldn't surprise anyone.  It finally gave Justice Scalia a chance to write a strongly textualist bankruptcy opinion for the Court, getting him out of the gulag of concurrences and dissents.  It helped, of course, that he cited myriad other ways to punish debtors than surcharing exemptions.  He wouldn't want to be accused of going soft.

Harvard Law School's Bankruptcy Roundtable, a dialogue between academics and practitioners, is now in the blogosphere!  The Roundtable has launched with a number of very substantive posts by Douglas Baird and Anthony Casey; Judge Sontchi; Thomas Jackson and David Skeel; Nelly Alemeida; and Marshal Huebner and Hilary Dengel.  I know that we academics benefit a lot from discussions with practitioners.

Chapter 15’s modified universalism structure requires cooperation between courts in different countries as well as tolerance for outcome differences under different bankruptcy laws. While in general it’s fair to say U.S. courts have been cooperative and tolerant, for some reason the issue of intellectual property licenses in bankruptcy brings out the worst in us.

I'm thrilled to join Credit Slips as an occasional contributor. As Bob mentioned, my research focuses on religious organizations that file under chapter 11. Based on the approximately 500 religious institutions that filed between 2006 and 2011 (about 90 cases per year), I previously concluded that primarily small nondenominational and congregationalist Christian churches seek to reorganize in hopes of retaining their buildings after they have fallen behind on mortgage payments.