For over eight years, In re Lehman Bros., No. 08-13555-scc (Bankr. S.D.N.Y.), has been one of the most active, complex bankruptcy dockets in the country. A large portion of the remaining contested matters in that case are claims by trustees for residential mortgage backed securities (RMBS), who continue to pursue claims against the Lehman estate for losses caused by toxic mortgages.

Our February 22 post reported that the Franchise Services of North America, Inc. decision of Bankruptcy Judge Edward Ellington of the Southern District of Mississippi dismissing a Chapter 11 petition because a shareholder had not approved the filing as required by the debtor’s charter was going directly to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on an expedited basis. It is the first case concerning the merits of contractual or structural bankruptcy-remoteness in my memory to reach a Court of Appeals since the adoption of the Bankruptcy Code in 1978.

Recently, in Gupta v. Quincy Medical Center, 858 F.3d 657 (1st Cir. 2017), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit clarified the limits of the bankruptcy courts’ subject-matter jurisdiction over civil proceedings. The decision, authored by Judge Lipez and joined by retired Supreme Court Justice David Souter (sitting by designation), provides a thorough analysis of the bankruptcy courts’ jurisdiction in such cases.

Substantive consolidation is the ultimate disregard of the corporate separateness of a group of related debtors--it is “the effective merger of two or more legally distinct (albeit affiliated) entities into a single debtor with a common pool of assets and a common body of liabilities,”[1] but without the actual de jure merger of the debtors.

The Bankruptcy Code provides for the appointment of a creditors’ committee in chapter 11 bankruptcy cases. See 11 U.S.C. § 1102. There is no parallel provision applicable to chapter 7 cases. When a bankruptcy case is converted from chapter 11 to chapter 7 while the creditors’ committee is pursuing an appeal, what happens to that appeal? In In re Constellation Enterprises LLC, Civ. No. 17-757-RGA, 2018 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 47153 (D. Del. Mar.

In U.S. Bank Nat'l Ass'n v. Village at Lakeridge, LLC, No. 15-1509, 2018 U.S. LEXIS 1520 (Mar. 5, 2018), the Supreme Court analyzed the appropriate standard of review for appellate courts reviewing a bankruptcy court’s determination of a “mixed question” of law and fact.

Back in the day--say, the last two decades of the twentieth century--we bankruptcy lawyers took it largely on faith that the right structural and contractual provisions purporting to confer bankruptcy-remoteness[1] were enforceable and likely to be successful in preventing an entity from becoming, voluntarily or involuntarily, a debtor under the Bankruptcy Code.

The Second Circuit recently issued an important decision on a “related to” jurisdiction case arising out of the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. SPV Osus, Ltd. v. UBS AG, 2018 U.S. App. LEXIS 3088 (2d Cir. Feb. 9, 2018).

In Dahlin v. Lyondell Chemical Co., 2018 U.S. App. LEXIS 1956 (8th Cir. Jan. 26, 2018), the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected an argument that bankruptcy debtors were required by due process to provide more prominent notice of a case filing than they did, such that the notice might have been seen by unknown creditors with claims to assert.

In this post, we return to cross-border insolvencies and examine one of the first decisions issued in 2018 by a bankruptcy court in a chapter 15 case: In re Energy Coal S.P.A., No. 15-12048 (LSS), 2018 Bankr. LEXIS 10 (Bankr. D. Del. Jan.