In 2005, more than two million Americans—six out of every 1,000 people—filed for bankruptcy. Though personal bankruptcy rates have since stabilized, bankruptcy remains an important tool for the relief of financially distressed households. In Bankrupt in America, Mary and Brad Hansen offer a vital perspective on the history of bankruptcy in America, beginning with the first lasting federal bankruptcy law enacted in 1898. Interweaving careful legal history and rigorous economic analysis, Bankrupt in America is the first work to trace how bankruptcy was transformed from an intermittently used constitutional provision, to an indispensable tool for business, to a central element of the social safety net for ordinary Americans. To do this, the authors track federal bankruptcy law, as well as related state and federal laws, examining the interaction between changes in the laws and changes in how people in each state used the bankruptcy law. In this thorough investigation, Hansen and Hansen reach novel conclusions about the causes and consequences of bankruptcy, adding nuance to the discussion of the relationship between bankruptcy rates and economic performance.

The Law of Debtors and Creditors, 2013 Casebook Supplement, Sixth Edition

Integrating the 1994 amendments To The Bankruptcy Act, this edition of Elizabeth Warren and Jay Westbrook's lively problem-based casebook is an outstanding choice for teaching debtor/creditor and bankruptcy law. The Third Edition of LAW OF DEBTORS AND CREDITORS: Text, Cases, and Problems builds on the extraordinary success of its previous edition, with: new problems and materials to reflect the 1994 statutory changes, including: The 1994 consumer bankruptcy amendments; the overruling of DePrizio; and changes throughout in dollar values more than 20 new cases, including Heintz v. Jenkins new newspaper articles on deadbeat dads, flawed bankruptcies, and more the latest empirical studies and scholarly literature. Excellent pedagogy: more than 50 realistic problem sets - including problems reflecting the 1994 statutory changes - that challenge students to learn and apply legal rules in the context of consumer and business issues a 'megaproblem' that runs throughout the book that shows the interrelationship of state law, consumer law, And The business bankruptcy system thorough and lucid explanatory text that gets students into the material faster and deeper a superb Teacher's Manual that highlights the statutory changes made since the last edition.

Americans now depend more heavily upon credit than any other society on Earth, or any other time in history. Borrowing has become a way of life for millions of families, and it is hard to imagine a time when charge accounts did not exist. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to assume that, because a wallet filled with plastic instead of cash is a relatively new phenomenon, Americans have not been borrowers and lenders since the colonization of the New World. Author Peter J. Coleman proves otherwise. In one Form or another -- notes of hand, book credit, commercial paper, mortgages, land contracts -- settlers borrowed to pay their passage from Europe, to buy and clear land, to build and operate mills, to purchase slaves, and to gamble and drink. Debtors' prison awaited those who could not pay their debts, and a pauper's grave received the unfortunate who lacked the private means to feed and clothe himself in prison. While the debtors' prisons described in this book no longer exist, the author maintains that our credit-oriented society has yet to devise cheap, efficient, equitable, and humane methods of enforcing contracts for debt.

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.