Sousa on Bankruptcy Stigma

If you are looking for trite and oversimplified assertions about bankruptcy stigma, then stay away from the latest issue of the American Bankruptcy Law Journal. In those pages, Professor Michael Sousa from the University of Denver has a wonderful paper reporting on his interviews with consumer bankruptcy debtors in Colorado. You can find a preprint version of the paper on SSRN. I had the pleasure of commenting on the paper at a conference earlier in the spring. Sousa is a new voice in the area of consumer debt who demonstrates with this paper the potential to make important contributions in the field.

Sousa treats bankruptcy stigma as the complex and nuanced topic it is. Methodologically, the paper is very careful. The interviews are presented for what they are, without trying to make them tsupport claims they cannot. Sousa is careful not to make claims about generalizability. Instead, the interviews provide insights about how the debtors perceived their bankruptcies and suggest hypotheses to for future work that will take us toward more generalizable conclusions. Sousa's findings on the relative lack of stigma among the self-employed are new and specifically suggest profitable areas of research. Overall, the debtors interviewed for the paper express feelings of stigma toward their bankruptcy.

Impressively, all of this research comes in a readable and concise paper that focuses primarily only on describing the world as it is. As a relatively new scholar, Sousa is to be commended for resisting the prolixity and vague normativity that characterize too much of today's legal scholarship. I look forward to following his work.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Sousa, Michael E (2012). "Bankruptcy Stigma: A Socio-Legal Study," American Bankruptcy Law Journal, 87:435-82.