In this article, we report on home ownership among no-asset chapter 7 debtors. The report is based on 5,832 non-business chapter 7 cases that were closed between 1999 and 2001. 3 We classified each debtor as an owner or a non-owner based on…
As H.R. 975, the "Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2003" (the Act), inches toward almost inevitable enactment, two questions are on the minds of many bankruptcy professionals. First, why single out consumer debtors…
A number of reported decisions and anecdotal reports indicate that despite the efforts of Congress to curtail, if not eliminate, bankruptcy petition preparers (BPPs), this "industry" continues to thrive. BPPs run the gamut from the single o…
Several years ago, this column addressed the then-growing tendency of bankruptcy courts to enter "first-day orders" allowing debtors to make post-petition payments on account of pre-petition unsecured employee wage claims over and above the…
The Clerk's Offices of U.S. Bankruptcy Courts offer the bankruptcy community a plethora of services that often are underutilized and may be unknown to many constituencies. Many clerk's offices have adopted a customer-service approach in org…
The choice of chapter by consumer filers cannot be reliably predicted by economic differences among jurisdictions or by legal differences such as the variance in state exemption levels. 2 In order to explain why, for example, chapter 13 cas…
Financing the American Dream, subtitled "A Cultural History of American Credit," takes a hard look at the effect that consumer credit facilities have on the social values in modern American culture. The author, an assistant professor of his…
Earlier this year, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals took the unusual step of granting a rehearing en banc to determine the standard for non-dischargeability of credit card debt in In re Mercer, 246 F.3d 391 (Miss. 2001). The rehearing fol…
Pursuant to 28 U.S.C. §1930, all chapter 7 debtors are currently required to pay a filing fee, although some debtors pay the fee in installments. For the first time, under S. 420 and H.R. 333, the court may waive payment of the filing fee i…
Dear Editor: A study by Thomas Neubig of Ernst & Young in July took issue with the bankruptcy gender analysis that Teresa A. Sullivan and Elizabeth Warren prepared. Neubig hoped that his more "accurate information" would "provide the fo…