chapter 13

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. 

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.

Chapter 13 bankruptcy offers debtors the opportunity to strip off a wholly unsecured second mortgage on their primary residence. Most courts have held that debtor’s mortgage is stripped from his house when he completes the Chapter 13 plan and gets his Chapter 13 discharge.

For the past couple of years, I've been thinking that cramdown is dead as a policy solution. But I was thinking about cramdown as requiring legislation. It doesn't. We could start doing it tomorrow. Under current bankruptcy law, a Chapter 13 plan may be confirmed only if secured creditors receive their collateral, receive the value of their collateral, or consent to the plan.