Student loan obligations are becoming not only more prevalent but also significantly larger. There is no doubt that several factors are driving this situation— e.g., the ever-increasing cost of post-secondary education and the decreasing va…
Editor's Note: Part II of this article will appear in the March 2005 issue. On Dec. 1, 2004, counsel for the debtors and their panel trustee squared off before the Supreme Court. The Court had granted certiorari in June to resolve a split a…
On Feb. 24, 2004, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit affirmed a U.S. District Court's reversal of a bankruptcy court order that had granted Kmart authority to pay the pre-petition clams of vendors that Kmart deemed critical t…
Editor's Note: This month's column provides an overview of some of the differences between bankruptcy "litigation" and litigation in a non-bankruptcy forum, highlighting some pitfalls that traditional litigators may encounter when they vent…
Editor's Note: This is the third in this column series for the newly minted chapter 11 professional. In our last installment, we began to paint a portrait of a chapter 11 debtor's life, from preparing for a bankruptcy filing to first-day he…
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…