It’s All Debt to Me, by Professor Kate Elengold, is a newly available article sure to be of interest to many Credit Slips readers. Check out the abstract and read the paper by clicking on this link, but in the meantime, an observation from the article’s conclusion, coupled with the article’s graphic of a set of triangles, frames what to expect:

This Article has identified, explained, and explored the way that varied laws and doctrine come together to create the “law of individual debt.” In so doing, it has offered both scaffolding and mapping to understand, holistically, how the law treats debtors and creditors across two axes: public/private and voluntary/involuntary. It asks and answers the question: why are four-similarly situated debtors, each carrying $15,000 of debt that they cannot repay, treated so differently under the law?