Jayfest and Bankruptcy Cases in the Supreme Court

Most of us Credit Slipsters enjoyed an absolutely fabulous symposium over the weekend celebrating the illustrious career of one of our own, Jay Westbrook. The Texas Law Review will publish a selection of several of the papers presented at the symposium (and TLR editors pulled off an amazing feat of organization in coordinating the travel and other logistics for this major event--kudos to them). All of the presentations were cutting-edge and extremely impressive, and many are available on the SSRN profiles of the authors listed in the symposium program. I want to highlight just one that I thought would be of particularly broad interest to Credit Slips readers.

The always impressive Ronald Mann described his recently released book, Bankruptcy and the U.S. Supreme Court. In his characteristically insightful and probing way, Mann looks into the private papers of the Justices for evidence of how and why they decide bankruptcy cases as they do. In his fascinating presentation at the symposium, he challenged conventional explanations of why the Court has construed the law to provide generally narrow relief (not only because of their boredom with the subject matter and/or a supposed adherence to narrow construction of statutory language) and offered provocative explanations based on, among other things, the presence (or absence) of a federal agency to advance a case for broader relief. The introduction of this new book immediately brought to my mind another recent and impressive analysis of Supreme Court bankruptcy jurisprudence, Ken Klee's Bankruptcy and the Supreme Court: 1801-2014. But Mann's latest contribution really seems to add something valuable, illuminating, and entertaining. Readers of this great new book will not find themselves, as Mann described one Justice's reaction to an oral argument, "in sleepy distress." Check it out, and watch for what will be a value-packed Texas Law Review symposium issue.