“Great cases…make bad law” declared Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in his dissenting opinion in the Northern Securities antitrust case of 1904. One of the most oft-quoted phrases any aspiring lawyer will hear in law school, this maxim stands for the proposition that decisions in cases of great importance from a public or social perspective make a poor basis upon which to construct a general law. Although an otherwise innocuous adversary bankruptcy proceeding (Daren A. Messer, et al. v. JPMorgan Chase Bank, NA (In re Messer), Adv. Pro.

Recently, a bankruptcy court for the district of Puerto Rico held that a debtor’s waiver of the automatic stay contained in a pre-petition forbearance agreement was enforceable. In re Triple A & R Capital Inv., Inc., 519 B.R. 581 (Bankr. D.P.R. 2014).

The United State Supreme Court issued an opinion on June 12, 2014 in Clark v.

The Bankruptcy Code has approximately 275 different sections. The number of its subsections and subparagraphs is well into the thousands. It is impossible to select the “most significant” provision in the Bankruptcy Code, but among the candidates for that title is certainly § 105 of the Code.

It is often said that the acid test of a security interest or lien on property is the bankruptcy of the property owner. If that person or entity files a bankruptcy petition, the bankruptcy trustee has a number of options to challenge or even avoid certain liens. A lien that is not properly perfected is subject to attack by a trustee under both the “strong-arm clause” (Bankruptcy Code § 544) and the preference provisions (Bankruptcy Code § 547). If the lien is avoided, the property can then be sold and the proceeds distributed to the unsecured creditors.

Nearly 30 years after enactment of the Bankruptcy Amendments and Federal Judgeship Act of 1984 and establishment of the current bankruptcy court structure, courts are still struggling to understand the bounds of a bankruptcy court’s jurisdiction and power. Unfortunately for one recent appellant, a bankruptcy court’s power to enter punitive damages is not as great as it had hoped.

When a person “pays” a debt with a fictitious check, someone other than the bad guy usually ends up losing. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals recently addressed such a situation inWhite Family Cos., Inc., v. Slone (In re Dayton Title Agency, Inc.), Case Nos. 12-3265;3359, July 31, 2013. In Dayton Title, the accused bad guy was Krishan Chari. Chari operated a real estate business in which he bought and sold commercial properties.

As with our prior posts on oil and gas leases in bankruptcy (located here and here), this post presents another thorny issue – namely, “Is an oil and gas lease a leas

On July 8, 2013, Ohio’s 5th District Court of Appeals issued an opinion that will be of interest to commercial equipment lessors in Ohio.  This case concerns the commercial lease of a beverage caddy and the status of the “middle man” lessee when the vendor undergoes bankruptcy.

As Ohio enjoys its latest boom in oil and gas exploration, it is important to understand how oil and gas leases are treated in bankruptcy. Unsettled Ohio law regarding whether a debtor owns unextracted oil and gas as part of the debtor’s real property can make this a difficult issue.