The Judge Behind the Curtain
by | posted in: Bankruptcy Administration and Jurisdiction, Bankruptcy Roundtable Updates | 0

By Melissa B. Jacoby (Graham Kenan Professor of Law – University of North Carolina School of Law)

Melissa Jacoby

After a district court halted OxyContin maker and hawker Purdue Pharma’s exit from bankruptcy by finding its restructuring plan unlawful in late 2021, the yellow brick road of this high-profile case forked in two. One path is traditional: more appellate process. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit agreed to review Purdue’s restructuring plan on a fast track and oral argument is expected to be scheduled for late April 2022. The second path reflects a popular development in the federal judiciary: the presiding bankruptcy judge appointed another sitting judge as a mediator to oversee negotiations between representatives of the Sackler family and states whose appeal had prevailed in the district court. According to the judicial mediator’s most recent report, the Sackler family has offered more money to resolve the dispute; many, though not all, of the objecting states are on board to settle. Expectations that a deal can be brokered run high. 

Purdue Pharma is not the only big restructuring in which a judicial mediator has been tasked with managing a high-stakes matter. As another recent example, six judges from different federal courts served as mediators in the Puerto Rico bankruptcy for almost five years: from June 23, 2017 through January 22, 2022. 

The use of sitting judges for this behind-the-scenes work is the topic of my forthcoming article. Why are judges mediating other judges’ cases, particularly when Congress encouraged use of private neutrals for alternative dispute resolution? Are traditional judicial accountability measures effective when judicial mediators work with parties and lawyers in a process that lacks a citable record? Finding that the standard accountability measures are an awkward fit for judicial mediation, the article calls on the Judicial Conference of the United States, the policy-making body for the federal judiciary, to take steps to maximize the benefits and minimize the risks of these practices. Whatever your own experiences have been with bankruptcy-related mediations, I hope you find this project useful. 

The full article is available here.

Bankruptcy’s Equity Canon
by | posted in: Bankruptcy, Bankruptcy Roundtable Updates | 0

By Jared Mayer (Law Clerk, Supreme Court of New Jersey)

Jared Mayer

The Bankruptcy Code constrains bankruptcy courts’ equitable powers, yet bankruptcy courts have often used those powers in ways that go beyond the Code’s text. This conflict creates tensions between various bankruptcy goals. The Code provides ex ante certainty and contains substantive policy choices, which equity threatens to compromise by allowing bankruptcy judges to override the text. Without equity, however, bankruptcy proceedings would provide parties with occasions to gain positional advantages in bankruptcy, thereby allowing them to unilaterally capture value at those other parties’ expense.

Drawing on insights from equity theory, this Essay identifies a role that equity can play to balance these interests. This Essay proposes an “equity canon” for bankruptcy courts to use when interpreting the Bankruptcy Code: judges should interpret unclear provisions by disregarding interpretations that would lead to inequitable outcomes. Equity theorists have illuminated equity’s role in combating opportunistic evasions of the law that cannot be identified and prevented ex ante. This is particularly important in bankruptcy. While bankruptcy proceedings are designed to maximize the estate’s value, parties nonetheless have incentives to capture value for themselves. Bankruptcy courts can use the equity canon to combat parties’ opportunistic exploitation of the Code while respecting the Code’s primacy.

The full Essay is available here.

Nothing herein reflects the views of the Supreme Court of New Jersey or the New Jersey Judiciary.

Debt Restructuring and Notions of Fairness
by | posted in: Bankruptcy Roundtable Updates, Cramdown and Priority, Workouts and Pre-Packs | 0

By Sarah Paterson (London School of Economics & Political Science)

In a recent article, I argue that we have repeatedly failed to identify clearly our concerns for fairness in different types of debt restructuring situations, and that this has confused corporate bankruptcy policy debate.  To defend the article’s thesis, I build a theoretical frame by unpacking the principles and the procedural demands of fairness from diverse fields of scholarship such as moral and political philosophy, biological sciences, psychology, organisation theory, group theory and economics.  I apply this theoretical frame to three very different types of debt restructuring: a restructuring of a small or medium sized enterprise; a restructuring of a large corporate; and a restructuring of a financial institution in English law.  In each case, a fairly typical fact pattern is outlined to ground the analysis, and the quality and extent of the fairness concerns examined.

The analysis in the article concentrates exclusively on fairness.  It does not consider the trade-off between fairness and other objectives (such as cost reduction), or utilitarian objections (such as concern that a situation which differentiates between classes of stakeholder in its approach to the fairness of the case would make stakeholders worse off overall), or arguments that what we might consider to be questions of fairness should properly be reinterpreted as economic questions.  In short, its objective is not to argue that fairness should prevail over all other considerations, but rather to explore, as an initial question, the quality of fairness in each of the situations with which it is concerned.

S. Paterson, ‘Debt Restructuring and Notions of Fairness’ (2017) 80(4) Modern Law Review 600 available here.