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Judge Robert Gerber will be stepping down at the end of this year, ending a storied judicial career highlighted by his oversight of the 2009 chapter 11 case of General Motors Corporation (“Old GM”).

There were nearly a million bankruptcy cases filed by individuals and businesses in 2014.  It is safe to say that only the tiniest fraction of such debtors have any familiarity with the Supreme Court’s decision in Stern v.

Energy Future Holdings (EFH), f/k/a TXU Corp., an energy company centered in Texas, was taken private in 2007 in the largest leveraged buyout transaction that has ever taken place.  The deal was largely predicated on an anticipated rise in natural gas prices; when prices instead plummeted the company, which had borrowed nearly $40 billion, was left with a massively unbalanced capital structure.  The chapter 11 cases of EFH and its subsid

One month ago, Judge Christopher Klein ruled in the city of Stockton, CA bankruptcy case that public employee pension obligations can be impaired in municipal bankruptcy cases under Chapter 9 of the Bankruptcy Code.  Last week, however, Judge Klein approved the plan of adjustment for Stockton that left public pension obligations intact over the vociferous objection of Franklin Investments, a major city bondholder whose claim was substantially reduced.  The confirmation of the Stockton plan underscores that even as there now appears to be a sound legal foundatio

Key Points:

This case presented a difficult and unique set of circumstances for the court to navigate while the scheme clock was ticking.

The recent approval of the David Jones scheme of arrangement demonstrates how, in the absence of shareholder opposition, the inexorability of a scheme timetable can cause problems for a court when there is a major development after the first court hearing.

Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the Southern District of New York last week ruled that the U.S. Bankruptcy Code does not permit a bankruptcy trustee to recover foreign transfers.  Specifically, Judge Rakoff refused to allow Irving Picard, the trustee of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC (“BLMIS”), to recoup monies initially transferred from BLMIS to non-U.S.