Allow me to showcase a book here that deserves more attention than it
gets from bankruptcy scholars. It came out back in 2002 but for
whatever reason, it passed more or less unnoticed in our corner of
academe. The book is When All Else Fails by David A. Moss.  The subtitle is: Government as the Ultimate Risk Manager.
It’s a fascinating study of what Moss calls "a potent and pervasive
form of public policy in the United States." Moss discusses obvious
risk management devices like worker’s insurance and social security,
but also others you might not think of at first blush like products
liability law and management of the money supply.

I emailed Moss
last year while I was resident scholar at the American Bankruptcy
Institute, inviting him to join us for one of our podcast interviews.
He politely begged off. Too bad: it would have been fun to introduce
him to the bankruptcy sodality. In any event, for our purposes, the
most directly relevant chapters of his book are one on the history of
the bankruptcy discharge, bracketed in parallel with another on the
rise of the limited liability company. Moss shows how 19th-century
public policy debate treated both bankruptcy and limited liability as
protection for entrepreneurs (duh!)–but how the arguments were never
really the same.

Students of the recent uproar over bankruptcy
reform might be intersted in Moss’s long view of the matter (which,
concededly, long preceded the 2005 Amendments to the Bankruptcy Code).

Even
before the enactment of the first federal bankrautpcy statutes in 1800
and 1841, Americans had long displayed a penchant for forgiving or
otherwise relieving distressed debtors, particulaly in the midst of
economic crisis. Although the motivations and mechanisms of debtor
protection have evolved considerably over the years, the American
tradition of shifting default risk away from borrowers has
exceptionally deep roots. Indeed, the United States has long
distinguished itself as a nation with a special fondness for debtors.
(126)

I always tell my students that I have lived through at least nine of the last four recessions.  As a regular reader of the Housing Bubble Blog,
it often occurs to me to wonder whether our current (relatively) severe
view of debtor protection will survive the day when the economy gets
thrown under a bus.

Here’s a book link.