Read complete books and articles on: Bankruptcy

Bankruptcy - in law, settlement of the liabilities of a person or organization wholly or partially unable to meet financial obligations. The purposes are to distribute, through a court-appointed receiver, the bankrupt's assets equitably among creditors and, in most instances, to discharge the debtor from further liability. In the United States, bankruptcy is controlled by a federal law adopted in

Bankruptcy proceedings may be voluntary (instituted by the debtor) or involuntary (instituted by creditors). The debtor may be insolvent—i.e., unable to pay all debts even if the full value of all assets were realized—or may become insolvent when current obligations mature. Bankruptcy is also permitted when the discharge of debts would otherwise be unduly delayed, e.g., if the debtor has fraudulently transferred property to put it out of a creditor's reach. When a person or corporation has declared or been adjudged bankrupt, preferred creditors (e.g., unpaid employees, or the federal government) are paid in full, and the other creditors share the proceeds of remaining assets.

The bankrupt individual receives more lenient treatment in the United States than in perhaps any other country, so that business initiative is not stifled by the threat of criminal or civil penalties following unintentional commercial failure. This ideal is evident in Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code, which permits courts to reorganize the assets of failing businesses instead of ordering complete liquidation of these assets. The 1978 revision of the code made it easier for corporate management to remain in control of a company during reorganization. These more lenient provisions led to a rapid increase in filings in the 1980s and 1990s; Congress has debated making further changes in the law to reverse this. Chapter 9 provides for the reorganization of bankrupt municipalities.

See study by T. Jackson (1986).

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13 of the Best Books and Articles on: Bankruptcy

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

Rescuing Business: The Making of Corporate Bankruptcy Law in England and the United States » Read Now
by Bruce G. Carruthers, Terence C. Halliday. 582 pgs.

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Corporate bankruptcy is a defining characteristic of the market economy. It encapsulates the fundamental conflicts between capital and labour, owners and managers, debtors and creditors, the state and the market. Yet, with one or two notable exceptions, the political and social dynamics of...
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Corporate bankruptcy is a defining characteristic of the market economy. It encapsulates the fundamental conflicts between capital and labour, owners and managers, debtors and creditors, the state and the market. Yet, with one or two notable exceptions, the political and social dynamics of bankruptcy law and practice have been overlooked by serious socio-legal scholars. This book remedies that neglect. Adopting an approach that compares English and American law, the authors identify the underlying political forces that established corporate bankruptcy law on both sides of the Atlantic. The book demonstrates how, by a recursive loop of professional self-interest, corporate insovency regulation is the creation of the lawyers who interpret and administer it. This book will be welcomed as an important sociological study and advances our understanding of how substantive law results from conflicts among the professionals who help to create it.
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2.

The Fall and Rise of Freedom of Contract (Chap. V "Bargaining around Bankruptcy Reorganization Law") » Read Now
by F. H. Buckley. 468 pgs.

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Declared dead some twenty-five years ago, the idea of freedom of contract has enjoyed a remarkable intellectual revival. In The Fall and Rise of Freedom of Contract leading scholars in the fields of contract law and law-and-economics analyze the new interest in bargaining freedom.
The 1970s was a...
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Declared dead some twenty-five years ago, the idea of freedom of contract has enjoyed a remarkable intellectual revival. In The Fall and Rise of Freedom of Contract leading scholars in the fields of contract law and law-and-economics analyze the new interest in bargaining freedom.
The 1970s was a decade of regulatory triumphalism in North America, marked by a surge in consumer, securities, and environmental regulation. Legal scholars predicted the "death of contract" and its replacement by regulation and reliance-based theories of liability. Instead, we have witnessed the reemergence of free bargaining norms. This revival can be attributed to the rise of law-and-economics, which laid bare the intellectual failure of anticontractarian theories. Scholars in this school note that consumers are not as helpless as they have been made out to be, and that intrusive legal rules meant ostensibly to help them often leave them worse off. Contract law principles have also been very robust in areas far afield from traditional contract law, and the essays in this volume consider how free bargaining rights might reasonably be extended in tort, property, land-use planning, bankruptcy, and divorce and family law.
This book will be of particular interest to legal scholars and specialists in contract law. Economics and public policy planners will also be challenged by its novel arguments.
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3.

Muddy Property: Generating and Protecting Information Privacy Norms in Bankruptcy, in William and Mary Law Review » Read Now
by Edward J. Janger. 81 pgs.

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...protecting information privacy norms in bankruptcy. by Edward J. Janger ABSTRACT Bankruptcy law does not deal well with website...legal treatment of privacy policies in...
4.

Kickin'em While They're Down: Consumer Bankruptcy Reform, in Journal of Economic Issues » Read Now
by William Waller. 18 pgs.

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...Kickinem While Theyre Down: Consumer Bankruptcy Reform. by William Waller ********** Consumer bankruptcy in the United States has taken on...Second, proposals for...
5.

The End of Bankruptcy, in Stanford Law Review » Read Now
by Douglas G. Baird, Robert K. Rasmussen. 39 pgs.

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...The end of bankruptcy. by Douglas G. Baird , Robert...were sold within a few months of its bankruptcy petition. (2) Within weeks of filing...electrical subcontractor who...
6.

The Politics of Lawmaking in Post-Mao China: Institutions, Processes, and Democratic Prospects (Chap. 7 "The Case of the Enterprise Bankruptcy Law") » Read Now
by Murray Scot Tanner. 290 pgs.

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China's struggle to develop it's legal system is helping to drive an `inadvertant transition' towards democratization in the future. Since Mao Zedong's death, the China Communist Party's (CCP) leaders have increasingly shifted to drafting most of their key policies as laws rather than Party edicts...
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China's struggle to develop it's legal system is helping to drive an `inadvertant transition' towards democratization in the future. Since Mao Zedong's death, the China Communist Party's (CCP) leaders have increasingly shifted to drafting most of their key policies as laws rather than Party edicts. The result has been a quiet but dramatic change in Chinese politics, recasting the relationship between the key lawmaking institutions: the Communist Party bureaucracy, the Cabinet (State Council), and China's legislaturethe National People's Congress (NPC). No longer a rubber stamp, NPC leaders and deputies, though still overwhelmingly members of the Communist Party, have become far more assertive and less disciplined in their dealings with other top Party and government leaders. Deputies now commonly stall, amend, block, and increasingly vote `no' on proposals approved by the Party Politburo and the Cabinet. China's NPC, like successful legislatures elsewhere, has also used its growing bureaucracy and subcommittees as institutional weapons to expand its influence over policy. The Politics of Lawmaking in China is the first book to examine all of the changing political institutions involved in lawmaking, and show how their evolution is reshaping Chinese politics. Drawing on internal documentation and interviews, it includes new information about how the CCP leadership attempts to guide the increasingly important process of lawmaking, and how this power has eroded greatly since 1978. Through detailed case studies, the book demonstrates how and why the top leadership is often forced to settle for far less than it wants in hammering out laws. Rather than encouraging the sort of anti-communist mass uprising from below that occurred in Eastern Europe in 1989, this book argues that China's changes in lawmaking are contributing to a more quiet transition from within the Communist system.
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7.

Credit Card Nation: The Consequences of America's Addiction to Credit (Chap. 5 "Life on the Financial Edge: Maxed out, Surfing, and Playing the Credit Card Shuffle") » Read Now
by Robert D. Manning. 408 pgs.

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Credit-card debt is choking American prosperity off at the neck. In Credit Card Nation, Robert D. Manning tells a fascinating story about the present and future consequences of credit dependence across all strata of U.S. society. Through extensive interviews with consumers, Manning talks to debtors...
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Credit-card debt is choking American prosperity off at the neck. In Credit Card Nation, Robert D. Manning tells a fascinating story about the present and future consequences of credit dependence across all strata of U.S. society. Through extensive interviews with consumers, Manning talks to debtors, and to average Americans, affected by what Manning describes as our "credit card nation": an American juggernaut of indebtedness that spans personal, corporate, and governmental debt.
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8.

Debt, Financial Fragility, and Systemic Risk ("Costs of Bankruptcy" begins on p. 44) » Read Now
by E. Philip Davis. 396 pgs.

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A remarkable feature of the period since 1970 has been the patterns of rapid and turbulent change in financing behaviour and financial structure in many advanced countries. These patterns have, in turn, often been marked by rising indebtedness, default on loans and periods of financial instability...
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A remarkable feature of the period since 1970 has been the patterns of rapid and turbulent change in financing behaviour and financial structure in many advanced countries. These patterns have, in turn, often been marked by rising indebtedness, default on loans and periods of financial instability, whether in the non-financial sectors, the financial sector or both. This book explores, both in theoretical and empirical terms, the nature of the relationships between underlying phenomena; namely levels and changes in borrowing (debt), vulnerability to default in the corporate and household sectors (financial fragility), and widespread disorder in the financial sector (systemic risk). Davis focuses on the wider generality of the phenomena at issue whereby similar patterns are observable in several countries, but not in others, as well as in the international capital markets themselves. Particular attention is paid to the importance of the nature and evolution of financial structure to the genesis of instability. Given the international scope of the analysis, the work is germane to the study of the devlopment of financial systems in all advanced countries, as well as the euromarkets. It will be of particular relevance, however, in the US, Japan, Germany, France, the UK, and Canada, Italy, Australia, Sweden, Norway, Finland, whose experience is examined in detail. In this expanded and revised edition, the macroeconomic consequences of fragility and the appropriate policy response are examined in particular detail, with the analysis focusing on macroeconomic performance in eleven countries over 1988-93. A wide range of issues relating to financial stability, including risk in payments systems, derivatives, and property lending, are also considered.
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9.

Firms, Contracts, and Financial Structure (Chap. 7 "Bankruptcy Procedure") » Read Now
by Oliver Hart. 230 pgs.

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This work uses recent developments in the theory of incomplete contracts to analyze a range of topics in organization theory and corporate finance. Beginning with a general model of the firm, Hart analyzes in greater depth the financial structure of firms, debt collecting and bankruptcy. Oliver Hart...
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This work uses recent developments in the theory of incomplete contracts to analyze a range of topics in organization theory and corporate finance. Beginning with a general model of the firm, Hart analyzes in greater depth the financial structure of firms, debt collecting and bankruptcy. Oliver Hart is a leading researcher in this area, and these Clarendon Lectures are an important contribution to contact theory. The work will be of interest to teachers, graduate students and advanced students of microeconomics, the theory of the firm, industrial organization, and finance.
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10.

A Contract Theory Approach to Business Bankruptcy, in Yale Law Journal » Read Now
by Alan Schwartz. 44 pgs.

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...A contract theory approach to business bankruptcy. by Alan Schwartz Business bankruptcy systems attempt to solve a coordination...after insolvency often fail.(3) Western...
11.

On the Nature of Federal Bankruptcy Jurisdiction: A General Statutory and Constitutional Theory, in William and Mary Law Review » Read Now
by Ralph Brubaker. 199 pgs.

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...On the nature of federal bankruptcy jurisdiction: a general statutory...debtors seeking relief from a federal bankruptcy court now number well in excess...employed by...
12.

Real Options in Capital Investment: Models, Strategies, and Applications (Chap. 17 "Default Risk in the Contingent Claims Model of Debt") » Read Now
by Lenos Trigeorgis. 364 pgs.

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This compilation integrates various new contributions to the growing "real options" literature. Recent developments in the valuation of capital investment opportunities seen as real options (e.g. to defer, expand, abandon, or switch) have provided the tools and unlocked the possibilities to...
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This compilation integrates various new contributions to the growing "real options" literature. Recent developments in the valuation of capital investment opportunities seen as real options (e.g. to defer, expand, abandon, or switch) have provided the tools and unlocked the possibilities to revolutionize the field of capital budgeting. The resulting insights, strategies, and techniques enable quantifying the thus far elusive elements of managerial operating flexibility and strategic interactions. These are vital to successfully capitalize on favorable future investment opportunities or limit losses from adverse market developments. This book presents various models and operating strategies, and a variety of applications ranging from acquisitions and divestitures, to natural resource development and pollution compliance. It is intended for both the academic and the professional market.
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13.

Insolvency in Private International Law: National and International Approaches (7.2 "Rules of International Jurisdiction: The Opening of a Bankruptcy") » Read Now
by Ian F. Fletcher. 468 pgs.

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This book provides a detailed analysis of the conceptual and practical problems posed by the increasingly common phenomenon of cross-border insolvency in respect to individuals and companies. Part I considers how such problems are approached and resolved under national legal regimes. Part II...
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This book provides a detailed analysis of the conceptual and practical problems posed by the increasingly common phenomenon of cross-border insolvency in respect to individuals and companies. Part I considers how such problems are approached and resolved under national legal regimes. Part II analyses the regional and international agreements and conventions that have been under negotiation in response to the special difficulties imposed by multi-jurisdictional insolvencies.
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