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On July 30, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit affirmed decisions by a bankruptcy court and a district court to dismiss a borrower’s student loan discharge request under the Bankruptcy Code, holding that Congress, not the courts, is responsible for changing the rules for discharging student loan debt in bankruptcy.

Recently, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit overruled its own precedent, holding that the plain language of the Bankruptcy Code authorizes modification of undersecured homestead mortgage claims—not just the payment schedule for such claims—including through bifurcation and cram down.

As Yeats said in his poem, The Second Coming: "mere anarchy is loosed upon the world". While perhaps not anarchy, certainly most insolvency practitioners expected the Alberta Court of Appeal decision in Redwater[1] to be upheld, preserving the priorities afforded to secured creditors and rendering the Provincial Government to be an unsecured Creditor.

On December 13, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Florida ruled that the operator of a computer-financing scheme cannot use his bankruptcy to discharge a $13.4 million judgment entered in 2016 for violating a 2008 FTC order.

On December 10, 2018, the Superior Court of Quebec (Court) released an important judgment concerning the assignment of contracts under the Companies' Creditors Arrangements Act (CCAA), in which the Court held that it was possible for an assignee to have contracts transferred to it without having to assume the monetary penalties arising from the assumed contracts for defaults by the assignor prior to the assignment.[1]

On October 26, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin denied a plaintiff’s motion for summary judgment and instead entered judgement in favor of two creditors and two consumer reporting agencies (collectively, “defendants”), holding that the debtor failed to show a factual inaccuracy in the credit reporting of a debt.

On November 8, a federal jury for the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota awarded the ResCap Liquidating Trust, the post-bankruptcy successor-in-interest to Residential Funding Company, LLC (RFC), a $27.8 million verdict in an indemnity case against a correspondent lender.

On June 29, the FDIC and Federal Reserve issued (here and here) a joint request for public comment on proposed revisions to resolution plan guidance for the eight largest and most complex U.S. banks.