Delaware Corporate Law and the “End of History” in Creditor Protection
by | posted in: Bankruptcy Roundtable Updates, Corporate Governance, Jurisprudence | 0

By Jared A. Ellias (University of California Hastings Law) and Robert J. Stark (Brown Rudnick LLP)

Jared A. Ellias
Robert J. Stark

We briefly survey the common law’s adventures with creditor protection over the course of American history with a special focus on Delaware, the most important jurisdiction for corporate law. We examine the evolution of the equitable doctrines that judges have used to answer a question that arises time and again: What help, if any, should the common law be to creditors that suffer losses due to the purported carelessness or disloyalty of corporate directors and officers? Judges have struggled to answer that question, first deploying Judge Story’s “trust fund doctrine” and then molding fiduciary duty law to fashion a remedy for creditors. In Delaware, the appetite of corporate law judges to protect creditors reached a high point in the early 2000s as judges flirted with recognizing a “deepening insolvency” tort cause of action. Suddenly, though, a new course was set, and Delaware’s judges effectively abandoned this project in a series of important decisions around the time of the financial crisis. In this “third generation” of jurisprudence, Delaware’s corporate law judges told creditors to look to other areas of law to protect themselves from opportunistic misconduct, such as bankruptcy law, fraudulent transfer law, and their loan contracts. However, the same question of whether the common law ought to protect creditors has arisen time and again and today’s “settled” law is unlikely to represent the end of history in creditor protection.

The full chapter is available here.

For related Roundtable posts, see Jared Ellias and Robert Stark, Bankruptcy Hardball.

Bankruptcy Hardball
by | posted in: Bankruptcy Administration and Jurisdiction, Bankruptcy Reform, Bankruptcy Roundtable Updates | 0

By Jared A. Ellias (University of California, Hastings) & Robert Stark (Brown Rudnick LLP)

On the eve of the financial crisis, a series of Delaware court decisions added up to a radical change in law: Creditors would no longer have the kind of common law protections from opportunism that helped protect their bargain for the better part of two centuries. In this Article, we argue that Delaware’s shift materially altered the way large firms approach financial distress, which is now characterized by a level of chaos and rent-seeking unchecked by norms that formerly restrained managerial opportunism. We refer to the new status quo as “bankruptcy hardball.” It is now routine for distressed firms to engage in tactics that harm some creditors for the benefit of other stakeholders, often in violation of contractual promises and basic principles of corporate finance. The fundamental problem is that Delaware’s change in law was predicated on the faulty assumption that creditors are fully capable of protecting their bargain during periods of distress with contracts and bankruptcy law. We show through a series of case studies how the creditor’s bargain is, contrary to that undergirding assumption, often an easy target for opportunistic repudiation and, in turn, dashed expectations once distress sets in. We further argue that the Delaware courts paved the way for scorched earth distressed governance, but also that judges can help fix the problem.

The full article is available here.