A bankruptcy trustee exercising her or his avoidance powers under Chapter 5 of the Bankruptcy Code may seek to recover the avoidably transferred property (or its value) from “the initial transferee,” “the entity for whose benefit such transfer was made” and “any immediate or mediate transferee of such initial transferee.”[1] Despite the authorization to seek recovery from multiple sources, “[t]he trustee is entitled to only a sin
Our May 22 post reported on the Supreme Court’s May 20 decision in Mission Product Holdings, Inc. v.
On April 29, New Jersey’s governor signed into law bill A4997, known as the Mortgage Servicers Licensing Act. As the title indicates, the Act creates a licensing regime for servicers of residential mortgage loans secured by real property within New Jersey. As with many state licensing regimes, the Act exempts most banks and credit unions from licensing.
It always amazes me when, after more than a half-century of Uniform Commercial Code (“UCC”) jurisprudence, an issue one thinks would arise quite commonly appears never to have been decided in a reported case. Such an issue was recently decided by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in an adversary proceeding in the Pettit Oil Co. Chapter 7 case.[1]
Can another vain attempt to mitigate a $1.5 billion mistake provide the occasion for a thorough review of the doctrine of earmarking? It did for Southern District Bankruptcy Judge Martin Glenn in the long tail on the General Motors bankruptcy case.
Our January 22, May 23, June 28,
Although it may be difficult to define precisely what an “executory contract” is (with the Bankruptcy Code providing no definition), I think most bankruptcy lawyers feel how the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously felt about obscenity--we know one when we see it. Determining that a patent license was executory in the first place was an issue in the Fifth Circuit’s recent decision in RPD Holdings, L.L.C. v.
In hindsight, it seems inevitable that constitutional and other jurisdictional problems would arise when Congress, in enacting the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978, created impressive new powers and responsibilities for the bankruptcy courts (along with a considerable degree of independence) but denied them the status of Article III courts under the Constitution (by denying its judges lifetime tenure, as Article III requires). And it didn’t take long for the problems to arise.