This authoritative treatise on bankruptcy fraud is an invaluable reference book for bankruptcy law practitioners, white-collar criminal lawyers, prosecutors, judges, restructuring professionals, and academicians. Bankruptcy Crimes is the only book extant on the subject and is unique in its dual perspective and analysis of criminality and bankruptcy law.

"Assignments for the benefit of creditors--or "ABCs"--Have evolved from small cases with claims of under $1 million to the dot-com implosion and now into a much more commonplace tool used for the expedited sales of assets, similar to [section] 363 sales under the Bankruptcy Code. The underlying principle, however, remains the same: using a neutral fiduciary to marshal, inventory and liquidate a debtor's assets in a manner that should maximize value for stakeholders. State legislatures across the country are reviewing and in many instances revising their laws governing ABCs and receiverships. Coupled with the increased use of Delaware Courts of Chancery for ABC cases, there has been an increase in court decisions about ABCs. This Fifth Edition of General Assignments for the Benefit of Creditors: The ABCs of ABCs addresses these changes and issues for insolvency practitioners to be knowledgeable about when considering the use of the ABC alternative"--Publisher's website

Bankruptcy in America is a booming business, with hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans filing for bankruptcy each year. Is this dramatic growth a result of mushrooming debt or does it reflect a moral decline that permits the middle class to evade their debts? As We Forgive Our Debtors addresses these questions with hard empirical data drawn from bankruptcy court filings. The authors of this multidisciplinary study describe the law and the statistics in clear, nontechnical language, combining a thorough statistical description of the social and economic position of consumer bankrupts with human portraits of the debtors and creditors whose journeys have ended in bankruptcy court. Book jacket.

Bankruptcy in America, in stark contrast to its status in most other countries, typically signifies not a debtor's last gasp but an opportunity to catch one's breath and recoup. Why has the nation's legal system evolved to allow both corporate and individual debtors greater control over their fate than imaginable elsewhere? Masterfully probing the political dynamics behind this question, David Skeel here provides the first complete account of the remarkable journey American bankruptcy law has taken from its beginnings in 1800, when Congress lifted the country's first bankruptcy code right out of English law, to the present day. Skeel shows that the confluence of three forces that emerged over many years--an organized creditor lobby, pro-debtor ideological currents, and an increasingly powerful bankruptcy bar--explains the distinctive contours of American bankruptcy law. Their interplay, he argues in clear, inviting prose, has seen efforts to legislate bankruptcy become a compelling battle royale between bankers and lawyers--one in which the bankers recently seem to have gained the upper hand. Skeel demonstrates, for example, that a fiercely divided bankruptcy commission and the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress have yielded the recent, ideologically charged battles over consumer bankruptcy. The uniqueness of American bankruptcy has often been noted, but it has never been explained. As different as twenty-first century America is from the horse-and-buggy era origins of our bankruptcy laws, Skeel shows that the same political factors continue to shape our unique response to financial distress.