The Unwritten Law of Corporate Reorganizations
by | posted in: Bankruptcy, Bankruptcy Administration and Jurisdiction, Chapter 11, Corporate Governance, fraudulent transfer, Jurisprudence | 0

Note: The Harvard Law School Bankruptcy Roundtable is pleased to resume regular weekly posts for the academic year.

By Douglas G. Baird (University of Chicago Law School)

Negotiations are the lifeblood of Chapter 11, and a large part of the bankruptcy judge’s job is to police them. Bankruptcy judges are not dispensers of Solomonic wisdom. They are referees who ensure a level playing field. They insist that the parties follow the rules, but they do not enforce rules for their own sake nor do they allow their oversight to interfere with the flow of play. Their job is to give parties a chance to work together on equal terms to find a path forward.

Notwithstanding the centrality of negotiations, little of the written law says much about how bankruptcy judges should oversee them. The few explicit statutory mandates are pitched at a high level of abstraction. They require little more than that judges ensure that bargains be proposed in “good faith” and meet certain substantive conditions to be considered “fair and equitable,” without defining how the bargaining process could meet these standards.[1] Precedent is similarly unhelpful. One can exhaust virtually all the guidance the Supreme Court has offered over the last century and a half in a few sentences: The judge cannot be a “silent registrar of agreements.”[2] Nor can the judge approve deals that “alter the balance” of substantive rights set out in the statute.[3] At the same time, the judge should not come to the aid of a creditor who declines a “fair offer.”[4] Lower courts are similarly silent. Among the many hundreds of volumes of reported opinions, few provide much guidance.

Much less is up in the air than it first seems, however. The judge is bound by a coherent set of unwritten principles that derive from the Statute of 13 Elizabeth and fraudulent conveyance law as it was received in this country in the late eighteenth century. Over the course of the nineteenth century, judges drew on this uncodified power to craft an approach to policing negotiations between creditors and a financially distressed debtor. The legal reforms of the 1930s and the 1970s drew again on these same principles. This unwritten law remains central to modern reorganization practice.

The Unwritten Law of Corporate Reorganizations traces this long arc of reorganization law in the United States. It uncovers a history rich with interesting characters, including Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, corporate law giant Paul Cravath, and SEC chairman and Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas. Their stories illuminate the way bankruptcy judges have long used a set of unwritten rules, derived from fraudulent conveyance principles, to oversee the reorganization process.

The book can be purchased here.

[1] 11 U.S.C. §1129.

[2] See Louisville Trust Co. v. Louisville, New Albany & Chicago Railway Co., 174 U.S. 674, 688 (1899).

[3] See Czyzewski v. Jevic Holding Corp., 137 S. Ct. 973, 987 (2017).

[4] Northern Pacific Railway Co. v. Boyd, 228 U.S. 482, 508 (1913).

 

A Bankruptcy History of Manias and Panics (in 80 pages)
by | posted in: Bankruptcy, Bankruptcy Roundtable Updates | 0

By Mark Perelman (Yale School of Management)

Mark Perelman

Fraud and irrationality are often blamed for financial manias and panics. Investor euphoria can unleash social and technological breakthroughs, but the subsequent collapse can destroy value and radicalize the political sphere. Are these events random, idiosyncratic, or driven by some force? The ex-post answers—be they monetary, criminal, or international contagion—have a profound impact on the role of government in society, but have questionable predictive power.

The historical narrative in this article does not argue that overvaluation, changes in money market rates, and fraud play no part in financial panics. However, the instigating events that lead creditors to become sensitive to information which might impair contractual protections suggests that financial panics are reactive to changes in jurisdictional bankruptcy processes. The history of bankruptcy law is intertwined with that of crises and banking law, and—as argued using over 50 case studies spanning the Dutch Tulipomania of 1637 to the Great Recession of 2008—consistently causes and accelerates financial manias and panics.

This narrative can be illustrated by the most recent case study in this article: The Great Recession. Following the earlier Asian Financial Crisis, international investors demanded safe debt. Whereas home mortgages were sensitive to information regarding borrower bankruptcy, these mortgages could become safe debt if default risk were reduced. The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (BAPCPA) restricted access to bankruptcy in favor of insolvency debt management plans and gave home mortgage lenders priority over other creditors. BAPCPA—along with the Bankruptcy Amendments and Federal Judgeship Act of 1984’s safe harbor around negotiable derivatives, which gave counterparties priority over other creditors—purposely reduced incentives to monitor counterparties and gave markets a (false) sense of security about the mortgages underlying the repo market. The low default risk increased liquidity and allowed lenders to remove risky assets from their balance sheet and expand mortgage financing.

While it’s not possible to quantify the effect of the bankruptcy process relative to all of the other effects, the case studies in this article hope to illustrate how these mechanisms operate to develop more resilient economies. Without appropriate legal technology to solve collective action problems in the presence of asymmetric information, market failures arise in the form of systemic runs on credit extended to banks and other intermediaries. In the wake of financial panics, these technologies are developed by the government, courts, and the private market to improve access to financing, alleviate failures, and reset the cycle.

The full article can be found here.