Just last month, the Bankruptcy Cave reported upon a Southern District of Texas case in which a debtor was denied discharge of a debt owed to an old (and likely former!?!) friend from church who had been required to pay off a student loan made to the debtor which the friend had guaranteed. Today we report another case involving friends and family and non-dischargeable student debt from the U.S.

Providing an exception to the axiom that no good deed goes unpunished, a Texas bankruptcy court recently declared nondischargeable a debt owed to a guarantor who had been forced to pay the debtor’s defaulted student loan.

Active participants in the derivatives market rely on the Bankruptcy Code safe harbor set forth in section 546(e) in pricing their securities. That provision restricts a debtor’s power to recover payments made in connection with certain securities transactions that might otherwise be avoidable under the Bankruptcy Code. Two high profile cases decided in 2011 addressed challenges to the application of section 546(e). The more widely reported decision (at least outside the bankruptcy arena) was in connection with the Madoff insolvency case. See Picard v.

On June 23, 2011, the Supreme Court of the United States issued the decision of Stern v. Marshall, debatably the most important case on bankruptcy court jurisdiction in the last 30 years. The 5-4 decision, written by Chief Justice Roberts, established limits on the power of bankruptcy courts to enter final judgments on certain state law created causes of action.