The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act in the U.S. requires that employers give sixty days’ notice to its employees before effecting a mass layoff.

Late last week, the United States Supreme Court said that it erred when it granted certiorari to resolve a bankruptcy dispute over whether state or federal law should apply to the recharacterization of debt. In In re Province Grande Olde Liberty, LLC, the Fourth Circuit affirmed the judgment of the bankruptcy court and district court, both of which had relied on the Bankruptcy Code to recharacterize a debt from a secured claim to a capital investment. The high Court took the matter up in June presumably to address the current circuit split on the issue.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit recently affirmed a bankruptcy court’s order granting the debtors’ motion to compel the trustee to abandon their home as property of the estate because it had little equity and thus little value for unsecured creditors.

A copy of the opinion is available at: Link to Opinion.

Third Circuit holds that State-specific protections in favor of oil and gas producers did not apply under Article 9 of the UCC

Recently, in Gupta v. Quincy Medical Center, 858 F.3d 657 (1st Cir. 2017), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit clarified the limits of the bankruptcy courts’ subject-matter jurisdiction over civil proceedings. The decision, authored by Judge Lipez and joined by retired Supreme Court Justice David Souter (sitting by designation), provides a thorough analysis of the bankruptcy courts’ jurisdiction in such cases.

In its fifth trip to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, the Sentinel Management Group’s bankruptcy case recently explored complex issues bankruptcy practitioners often encounter in large chapter 11 cases with financial services debtors.

Section 503(b)(9) of the Bankruptcy Code (11 U.S.C. §503(b)(9)) provides a special administrative priority claim for someone that supplies goods to a debtor in the 20 day period before the bankruptcy filing, but is unpaid as of the date of the filing. This is a meaningful priority. Administrative priority claims, which are on par with the claims of other post-petition service providers, like the debtor’s professionals, must be paid in full at the time of the confirmation of a plan, in order for a plan to be confirmed.

The Bottom Line

In Schoenmann v. Bank of the West (In re Tenderloin Health), 849 F.3d 1231 (9th Cir. 2017), a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit recently addressed as a matter of apparent first impression whether or not a bankruptcy court can consider hypothetical preference actions in analyzing whether a creditor-transferee in preference litigation received more than it would have received in a hypothetical chapter 7 liquidation, as required by section 547(b)(5) of the Bankruptcy Code.

On August 4, 2017, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals issued its ruling in Varela v. AE Liquidation, Inc. (In re AE Liquidation, Inc.), 2017 U.S. App. LEXIS 14359 (3d Cir.