CreditSlips

Consumers and Price Volatility: Texas Electricity Prices

02/21/21

Some Texas consumers who didn't lose power are now finding themselves socked with massive electric bills, as high as $17,000. The reason? They were paying variable kW/h pricing for their electricity at wholesale rates, without any sort of price collar. The Washington Post explains: 

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Does Delaware Get the Final Say?

02/19/21

I've been doing some reading on officer and director fiduciary duties to creditors, and I am surprised that how much the academic and practitioner consensus seems to have settled on the notion that, in light of the Delaware caselaw following Gheewalla, it is essentially impossible for creditors to bring a fiduciary action against a board.

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NRA Bankruptcy: Enter Kirkland?

02/18/21

The latest development in the NRA bankruptcy is the NRA's motion to retain Kirkland & Ellis as special counsel.  The retention seems to be for appellate issues, and the partner submitting the retention affidavit is an appellate specialist, not a bankruptcy lawyer. Yet this raises the question why Kirkland, which has long represented the NRA in various matters, is not the NRA's bankruptcy counsel. Kirkland has one of the top chapter 11 practices in the US.

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Is the NRA Out of Bullets?

02/17/21

The NRA's Gone to Texas bankruptcy just keeps getting wilder and wilder. First an NRA board member files a motion for an examiner. Then the NRA's largest creditor files a motion for the case to be dismissed as a bad faith filing (or in the alternative seeking a trustee).

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Is the NRA Board Shooting Itself in the Foot By Doing Nothing?

02/10/21

In my previous blog post on the NRA bankruptcy, I was focused on the bankruptcy implications of the incredible examiner motion filed by an NRA board member against the NRA. But as I think about it more, it's also got some important corporate governance implications: did the NRA board violate its fiduciary duties?  

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NRA Examiner Motion

02/08/21

As I predicted, things were not going to go so smoothly for the National Rifle Association in bankruptcy. Today, the Hon. Phillip Journey, an NRA board member and Kansas state judge, filed an examiner motion in the case.

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Fairness and Flexibility: Understanding Corporate Bankruptcy’s Arc

02/08/21

I don't post most of my law review articles here, but my latest might be of some interest to Slips readers generally. In Fairness and Flexibility: Understanding Corporate Bankruptcy’s Arc, out now in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Business Law, I trace the long history of American business reorganization law, starting with antebellum mortgage foreclosures under state statute, up to the present Restructuring Support Agreements (RSAs).

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Eviction Moratoria Save Lives: the Evidence

02/03/21

Once in a while you see an empirical paper that makes you say "wow." That's my first reaction to an NBER paper out from some economists and a sociologist at Duke and UNC. The paper, entitled "Housing Precarity & the Covid-19 Pandemic: Impacts of Utility Disconnection and Eviction Moratoria on Infections and Deaths Across US Counties" has an absolute bombshell finding:  eviction and utility disconnect moratoria save lives.  A lot of them.  

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NRA Bankruptcy

01/15/21

The National Rifle Association filed for bankruptcy in the Northern District of Texas (Dallas). The NRA's press release says that the purpose of the bankruptcy is to enable the NRA to change from being a New York corporation to a Texas corporation.

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