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The Fourth Circuit was right on target last year when it held that C1322(c)(2) does not permit the bifurcation of an undersecured claim into separate secured and unsecured claims, as several bankruptcy courts had held. Witt v. United Compan…
First and foremost, bankruptcy is about people—people who have problems. They look to their lawyers and to the court for a solution to those problems. More than 95 percent of all bankruptcy cases involve consumers, not businesses or corpora…
It is not unusual for consumer debtors to have borrowed from a qualified retirement or savings plan pre-petition to meet cash needs. Typically the debtor schedules the plan as a creditor with a claim in the amount of the outstanding balance…
Editor's Note: Part II of this article will be published in the March 1999 ABI Journal. One of the more interesting interactions between the Bankruptcy Code and the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) is the treatment of the reclaiming seller. Ba…
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…
The most embattled creditor in the consumer bankruptcy arena in recent years has been Sears Roebuck and Co. 1 In the following cases, Sears again finds itself at center stage in a consumer bankruptcy controversy. This time, the controversy …
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…
Every day, those of us in and around the bankruptcy court face the alarming reality that during the past 10 years there has been a 96 percent increase in bankruptcy filings among those age 25 years or less. Our interactions with this age gr…