Bankruptcy Generally

Detroit's bankruptcy filing today is obvious grabbing some headlines. It's not clear, however, how much bankruptcy can do to fix Detroit. Bankruptcy is really good at dealing with problems created by overleverage.  If there's too much debt, a debtor, municipal, corporate or consumer, can use bankruptcy to slough it off.  Similarly, if the problem is some bad contracts outstanding, bankruptcy's got that covered too.

A few weeks ago, I posted about an apparent movement to challenge the bankruptcy-exempt status of IRAs based on boilerplate language commonly found in the account agreements of many of the nation's largest brokerages. The legal argument rested on hyper-technical interpretations of the Bankruptcy Code and the account agreements, but nonetheless several lower courts had ruled that debtors could lose their IRAs to the bankruptcy trustee.

One of the frustrations experienced by all business bankruptcy attorneys seeking engagement in chapter 11 cases can be traced to the vague language of Rule 2014. The rule requires the disclosure of information necessary to determine whether the professional’s employment is in the best interest of the estate. 

Bankruptcy lawyers and judges often toil away in the lower reaches of the federal judicial over not-so-momentous issues such as the value of a refrigerator. When bankruptcy issues get to the Supreme Court, we tend to get excited. Boy, did that balloon get popped in Adam Liptak's New York Times column this morning about a recent tendency toward unanimity in the Supreme Court: