• Debt’s Grip Now Available!

    Posted by

    Bob Lawless

    Debt's Grip CoverToday is the official release date for our new book, Debt's Grip: Risk and Consumer Bankruptcy, from the University of California Press. Debt's Grip uses eleven years of court records and surveys from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project to provide a thick description of what it means to live in financial precarity in the United States. Through personal narratives from our surveys, bankruptcy filers describe in their own words the privations and struggles they suffered. It has been a privilege to work with Pamela Foohey (also a Slips blogger) of the University of Georgia and Debb Thorne of the University of Idaho to put this book together. 

    We wrote the book so it would be accessible to nonlawyers. The second chapter of the book describes the bankruptcy process in plain English. We then continue by documenting the increasingly lengthy period of time people sit in the financial "sweatbox" before filing bankruptcy. The next three chapters are built around types of debts–home and car debts, medical debts, and credit card and other unsecured debts. Demographics are part of the bankruptcy story. A chapter discusses how the bankruptcy system both reflects and exacerbates larger patterns of racial inequality. Another chapter looks at the overrepresentation of women and especially single women raising children. We then look at the fastest growing group of bankruptcy filers — adults age 65 and over. The book then turns to how debt collection and changes in that industry have shaped bankruptcy filings. The final chapter was supposed to be about the exceptions — bankruptcy filers with resources who were using the system to escape debts they could pay. I say "supposed to be" because we could not find those cases from the 8,800 files in our sample. Well, we did find one, but the court dismissed the case!

    The book is available from the UC Press, Bookshop.org, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other outlets. We have a busy semester of events where we will be discussing the book and are always looking for more opportunities. 

     

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  • Arbitration for Thee, But Not for Mike Lindell

    Posted by

    Bob Lawless

    The Eighth Circuit has overturned an arbitration award in favor of a software developer who took up the $5 million challenge of MyPillow founder, Mike Lindell, to "Prove Mike Wrong" about his claims the 2020 presidential election was stolen. The dispute went to arbitration per the boilerplate predispute terms in Mr. Lindell's contest rules. The arbitrators heard the evidence, gave reasons for their decisions, and decided in favor of the software developer. The software developer then used the Federal Arbitration Act, which requires federal courts to confirm an arbitration award (making them enforceable as a court judgment).

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  • Will Corporate Treasuries Have Any Interest In Using Stablecoins?

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    Adam Levitin

    With the GENIUS Act signed into law now we get to see if stablecoins can actually walk the walk, not just talk the talk. The story the stablecoin industry has told is one of payments innovation, particularly for international payments, with stablecoins poised to displace the expensive and ungainly wire transfer system. Is this right?

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  • The “Big Beautiful Bill” & Law-School Student Loan Debt

    Posted by

    Bob Lawless

    The president has done yet another thing that will have massive effects on legal education. No, this is not about how I must overhaul my Consumer Finance syllabus. Granted, the poor saps who teach Constitutional Law have it worse, but they knew what they signed up for.

    If you have not dug into the details of H.R. 1, An Act to Provide for Reconciliation Pursuant to Title II of H. Con. Res. 14, there are some biggies for those who care about how legal education is funded and administered. Known in some circles as the "Big, Beautiful Bill," this law massively overhauls federal student loan programs. Jeff Robledo at USA Today has a good summary of what the changes mean for borrowers generally. For law schools, there is a biggie.

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  • Teaching Trustee Exemption Planning in Bankruptcy

    Posted by

    Pamela Foohey

    Since I began teaching the bankruptcy survey course, I've added extra material apart from the textbook that I've named "trustee exemption planning." The core of this material is Schwab v. Reilly, 560 U.S. 770 (2010), which I've assigned more or less in its entirety. The case is a useful vehicle to discuss how to claim exemptions, what debtors (and their attorneys) may do if the value of property is unclear, what trustees likewise may do if the value of property is unclear, and how trustees may make money for creditors from an estate. The debtor, Reilly, also has a moving story about opening a restaurant and wanting to keep kitchen equipment that is sentimental to her. I give students her handwritten schedules outlining every piece of equipment she seeks to retain. The case also outlines how a trustee can preserve value for the estate beyond the relevant exemptions.

    But the case is getting older. The forms modernization project updated Schedule C to align with its holding. Enter a new case, published about a month ago, In re Collins, Case No. 24-54928, Judge John E. Hoffman, Jr., Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Ohio. Bill Rochelle highlighted it for its clarification of what a trustee must do to object to an exemption claiming "100% of FMV." I am posting about the opinion to further highlight it for its usefulness in teaching about exemptions in consumer bankruptcy.

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  • The 23andMe Court Got It Right; Is that Wrong?

    Posted by

    Bob Lawless

    The bankruptcy court approved 23andMe's motion to sell its assets in its chapter 11 case. Those assets include the genetic information its customers had entrusted to the company. Understandably, many customers and government regulators had concerns about the deal. In the end, Judge Walsh got it right on the law. 

    All that was at issue in the motion before Judge Walsh was whether 23andMe satisfied the requirements to sell assets in bankruptcy. The consumer privacy ombudsman suggested restrictions on the transfer of its customers' genetic information. Those restrictions might serve the common weal, but Judge Walsh had to stick to the law Congress had given him. That law is a textual mess. The intentionalism and purposivism on display in the opinion cuts through the textual problems. There is a lot to the opinion, but for now I will just focus on the section 363 issue.

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  • What Are Law Reviews Good For?

    Posted by

    Bob Lawless

    Adam recently posted his laments about the state of law reviews, which has been an issue only since the 1930s. I have a different theoretical lens that fills a gap in the literature that, at first blush, seems counterintuitive, and for the first time in the history of civilization fills an unexplored niche. I have now run out of law-review clichés (but invite commenters to list their favorites). 

    The Washington Free Beacon story about the publication practices at the Harvard Law Review moves me not at all. If web sites can be "rags," the Beacon is an egregious one. As I write this post, the main headline reads, "Trump Delivers Victory in 12-Day War: Thank You, Mr. President, for Your Attention to This Matter." I put no reliance on a document review from any organization with such a thin connection to reality and committed obeisance to a regime that itself treats reality as an obstacle to overcome. Maybe somebody with more time will dig through the thousands of pages of documents the Beacon made available. As far as I know, no one has questioned their authenticity although it would be fair to wonder whether the Beacon has curated the documents it made available.

    Still, Adam is not wrong, and he raises a good question. What good are law reviews in a world of widely available online sources where authors can quickly connect with audiences (such as the blog post you are reading)? Do law reviews now cause more harm than good?

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  • It’s Time to Get Rid of Law Reviews

    Posted by

    Adam Levitin

    The Washington Beacon has published an absolutely jaw-dropping piece about the Harvard Law Review's article selection process, which allegedly gives substantial consideration not just to the assumed identity (race, gender, sexual orientation) of the author, but to the assumed identity of the authors of sources cited. (Who knew that I should have been indicating in every citation the race, gender, and orientation of the author?)

    I haven't bothered submitting to HLR for some time, but if the allegations are true, it still leaves me dismayed that I have had my time wasted as an author and furious that I have had my time wasted doing outside reviews. Don't ask me to do free reviews when it's just for show. I'm just waiting for the class action…

    It’s easy to dismiss the HLR fiasco as an example of woke gone wild, and that’s undoubtedly part of the problem, but the more fundamental problem is that student editors should have no business selecting articles. Indeed, as I will argue below, law reviews are a medium that has served its purpose and they should shut down—there’s a much better way to disseminate legal scholarship: connecting authors directly to legal research databases (direct-to-database publishing).

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  • Bulgaria finally adopts personal insolvency law

    Posted by

    Jason Kilborn

    At long, long last, Bulgaria yesterday finally became the last EU Member State to adopt a personal insolvency law (Malta's law, effective late last year, seems to provide relief only for entrepreneurial debts, but it technically extends relief to individuals owing such debts, which is all the relevant EU Directive requires). To say the Bulgarian parliament adopted this law begrudgingly would be a significant overstatement of the enthusiasm for this new procedure–after many years of resistance, Bulgarian lawmakers seem to have relented under financial pressure from EU authorities. "Begrudgingly" also seems to be an apt characterization for how the new law offers debt relief to individuals, given its requirements and restrictions, but we'll have to see how the law is implemented. In any case, this is a watershed event worthy of note. 

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  • AI Models on Law School Exams

    Posted by

    Mitu Gulati

    The question of how well AI can do on law school exams is one that interests me, since I give exams and want them to be a measure of how much my students have learned (as opposed to their skills at using AI — although I want them to learn those too). Others appear to be interested too — just see the ssrn downloads for papers on this topic.  Caveat: I can't pretend that I have more than the shallowest of understandings of AI models.  But this cool new paper I came across might be of interest to folks.  

    The paper is from a set of scholars at ETH in Zurich (a place long known for its excellent research).  As I understand the draft (and, to repeat, I don't understand a lot of this stuff), the paper finds that the large language models (LLMs) don't do that great when you increase the level of reasoning required on the exam.  I was also intrigued to read (I think) that LLMs are not necessarily better on multiple choice exams than essay type ones.  From the abstract, here is a sentence that stood out: "Our evaluation on both open-ended and multiple-choice questions present significant challenges for current LLMs; in particular, they notably struggle with open questions that require structured, multi-step legal reasoning".  

    The paper is "LEXam: Benchmarking Legal Reasoning on 340 Legal Exams" 

    Among the other cool things about this paper to me is how collaborative it is — students, professors, and even judges.  To me, it reflects well on the culture of the institution that has such a degree of collaboration. 

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Pamela Foohey

Anna Gelpern

Melissa Jacoby

Jason Kilborn

Bob Lawless

Adam Levitin

Christopher Odinet

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