Enhancing Rescue in Chapter 11: Lessons from Reform Efforts in the United Kingdom

This is a dynamic time for insolvency law. Many jurisdictions have or are considering reforms to their insolvency regimes. The U.K. has proposed a new standalone restructuring mechanism that incorporates many attributes of Chapter 11, including a cross-class cram down and the absolute priority rule. A distinctive feature of the U.K proposal is the infusion of judicial discretion permitting courts to deviate from the absolute priority rule. This discretion is not permitted in the U.S. This judicial discretion addresses a key problem with the application of the absolute priority rule in the U.S. – it serves as an impediment to reorganization. This impediment is exacerbated by the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, Czyzewski v. Jevic Holding Corp., which impacts the effective use of Chapter 11 rescue tools. This article explores the absolute priority rule, the problems associated with it and the effect of Jevic in the U.S. The case is made that the strict application of the absolute priority rule in the U.S. is antiquated and drawing on the U.K. reform proposal the author argues that the U.S. should implement reforms that infuse judicial discretion into the application of the absolute priority rule. Doing so will facilitate the underlying the policy goal of rescuing the company in Chapter 11, but also promote a broader policy goal of rescuing the business

Ten Years After Consumer Bankruptcy Reform in the United States: A Decade of Diminishing Hope and Fairness

The tenth anniversary of the effective date of Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (Reform Act), the largest reform to the consumer bankruptcy in the United States in a quarter of a century, will be marked in October of 2015. Prior to, and since its passage, scores of scholars have theorized about the impact of the Reform Act. The vast majority of research since its passage shows that the Reform Act has not had a long-term impact on filing rates. With this backdrop, the paper explores how the virtues of fairness for creditors and hope for individuals are not enhanced by the Reform Act. The consumer bankruptcy system in the United States appears to be largely the same as it was prior to the Reform Act without any meaningful improvement for individuals in need of relief. In fact, the virtues of hope and fairness appear to be diminished under the Reform Act

Ten Years After Consumer Bankruptcy Reform in the United States: A Decade of Diminishing Hope and Fairness

The tenth anniversary of the effective date of Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (Reform Act), the largest reform to the consumer bankruptcy in the United States in a quarter of a century, will be marked in October of 2015. Prior to, and since its passage, scores of scholars have theorized about the impact of the Reform Act. The vast majority of research since its passage shows that the Reform Act has not had a long-term impact on filing rates. With this backdrop, the paper explores how the virtues of fairness for creditors and hope for individuals are not enhanced by the Reform Act. The consumer bankruptcy system in the United States appears to be largely the same as it was prior to the Reform Act without any meaningful improvement for individuals in need of relief. In fact, the virtues of hope and fairness appear to be diminished under the Reform Act

Speciesism, identity politics and ecocriticism : a conversation with humanists and posthumanists

An electronic conversation between 7 scholars from the fields of animal studies and early modern studies aimed at confronting "speciesism," and constructing what Cary Wolfe calls a "posthumanist theory of the subject.

Consumer Bankruptcy Reform: Debtors\u27 Prison without Bars or Just Desserts For Deadbeats?

This article provides an overview of current bankruptcy law and filing trends in the United States. It then provides an overview of the major changes to consumer bankruptcy and further analyzes several of the more controversial areas of the new law, placing them in historical context and exploring the possible ramifications of these dramatically sweeping changes. Such changes are illustrated by the journey of hypothetical debtors, Ura and Ima Broke, through the new bankruptcy maze. This illustration shows the complexity and inconsistency of the amended Bankruptcy Code. Examining the reform from the vantage point of hypothetical debtors shows how the reform can be viewed from two very different perspectives: as a return to debtors\u27 prisons and early bankruptcy laws that treated debtors as offenders or as just desserts for deadbeat debtors

Teleparallel Minkowski Spacetime with Perturbative Approach for Teleparallel Gravity on Proper Frame

In this paper, we first develop a complete perturbation theory requiring only the perturbation of the fundamental quantities describing Teleparallel Gravity. We first obtain the physical quantities by perturbing the coframes taking into account the gauge metric and spin-connection conditions. We obtain the perturbed field equations involving these perturbed quantities. We will study some specific cases of perturbations of coframes and finally discuss the stability of the Minkowski background. Our perturbation framework is based on using a proper orthonormal frame throughout, which is possible since we remain with a theory of Teleparallel Gravity.Comment: 33 pages, submitted to a journa