A careful analysis of the fundamentals of bankruptcy law.

Municipal bankruptcy's recent prominence has stimulated academic interest in the workings of Chapter 9, much of it critical, but no general framework has been developed against which scholars and policymakers can evaluate the law's performance. This article offers a normative, economic account of municipal bankruptcy and uses that account to assess current law and suggest changes. It contends that bankruptcy's singular aim should be to preserve spatial economies--the advantages to locating within a municipality's unique geographic boundaries--where large public debts, by discouraging investment, threaten to dissipate them. Judged with this end in view, it is argued, Chapter 9 is a marked failure. The law's compass is so narrow that intervention comes, if at all, only when spatial economies are likely to have been squandered and economic dysfunction taken hold. Municipal bankruptcy, as it now exists, serves mainly as an ad hoc and ill-conceived subsidy program. This article outlines changes to the law that could hasten debt relief, while acknowledging potential objections.

This authoritative treatise on bankruptcy fraud is an invaluable reference book for bankruptcy law practitioners, white-collar criminal lawyers, prosecutors, judges, restructuring professionals, and academicians. Bankruptcy Crimes is the only book extant on the subject and is unique in its dual perspective and analysis of criminality and bankruptcy law.

In this Research Handbook, today’s leading experts on the law and economics of corporate bankruptcy address fundamental issues such as the efficiency of bankruptcy, the role and treatment of creditors – particularly secured creditors – in the bankruptcy process, the allocation of going-concern surplus among claimants, the desirability of liquidation in the absence of such surplus, the role of contract in bankruptcy resolution, the role of derivatives in the bankruptcy process, the costs of the bankruptcy system, and the special case of financial institutions, among other topics.