News Topic: Historical Perspectives

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is doing something promising with its anti-abuse authority under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010.  It is going after credit industry exploitation of consumers, particularly ... Read full article

Last Friday was the filing deadline set by (a rather irked ) Judge Griesa for Argentina and interested third parties in that country's long-running battle with NML and other restructuring holdouts. ... Read full article

While we wait to see if the second Obama administration will do anything new to help homeowners hit by the lingering mortgage crisis (finally replace Bush-holdover Ed DeMarco at FHFA to make way for debt relief ?), there’s time to review a recent ... Read full article

"[T]he principal beneficiaries of the litigation were an unscrupulous body of commercial pirates, who had purchased ... bonds at a mere nominal price..." ... Read full article

Good times in the economy mean goods times a few years later for bankruptcy professionals who deal with consumer cases.  We saw this from the mid-1990s through the 2000s. The last big party in the bankruptcy world was in 2010 (1.5 million non-business ... Read full article

Although not always acknowledged expressly, exceptionalism is pervasive in bankruptcy scholarship. Some work makes no attempt to contexualize bankruptcy within the federal courts, apparently assuming its unique qualities (for example, the disinterest in ... Read full article

The NYTimes had a very good editorial today bemoaning, with resignation, that there will not be any serious prosecutions of senior bank executives or institutions for the financial crisis.  The biggest fish to be caught was Lee Farkas. Who? That's ... Read full article

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

From the the second volumn of J.F. Molloy, Court Life Below Stairs (rev ed. 1885), regarding events after the death of George III's spouse, Queen Charlotte : ... Read full article

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 ... Read full article

A correspondent and I were discussing the changes wrought by the 1978 enactment of the current U.S. Bankruptcy Code. My correspondent noted that corporate bankruptcy became more salient after 1978 and linked this phenomenon to the 1978 law. My perception ... Read full article

Calling everyone in the over-40 set to help me remember something. When dealing with those old-fashioned things called “checks,” how did your own overdraft protection used to work?  My recollection is that, back in the day, as long as a person had a ... Read full article