Supreme Court

 The Fifth Circuit has long applied judicial estoppel aggressively when a debtor fails to list a cause of action. It once held (in a panel opinion overruled by the en banc court) that a trustee was bound by a debtor's failure to disclose assets. Reed v. City of Arlington, 620 F.3d 477 (5th Cir. 2010), rev'd en banc 650 F.3d 571 (5th Cir. 2011).

https://www.georgiabankruptcyblog.com/files/2026/02/Reasonable-Time-Adobe

In an opinion that resolves decades of circuit court splits, the Supreme Court ruled against allowing nonconsensual third-party releases. Harrington v. Purdue Pharma, LP, No. 23-124 (6/27/24) which can be found here.  While the opinion is emphatic in its rejection of extra-textual plan provisions, the 5-4 ruling and numerous caveats mean this won't be the last time creative lawyers will be testing the limits of the Code.

Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson has played a variety of roles in her legal career. She has been a public defender, an attorney in private practice, a member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, a U.S. District Judge and a Court of Appeals Judge. Unfortunately, these jobs have given her scant exposure to bankruptcy law. I will explore all three of her bankruptcy related opinions (out of a total of about 600) as well as a handful of her other jurisprudence.

A Small Exposure to Bankruptcy

 This post was originally intended to be about the bankruptcy jurisprudence of Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett. That would have been a very short post. She has been on panels which issued seven per curiam unpublished opinions in bankruptcy matters, none of which were very remarkable. Instead, I will look at three of her opinions dealing with consumer financial services and cases where she did not rule for law enforcement or employers,  traditional favorites of conservatives.