In Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll’s sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, there is a famous exchange between Humpty Dumpty and Alice regarding the meaning of words. Toward the end of that dialogue, Alice asked Humpty Dumpty what he meant by the word “impenetrability.” Humpty Dumpty’s response was to not only give the word a meaning that would not be found in any dictionary, but to also expand the meaning he gave the word so that it required affirmative action on Alice’s part.

“The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.”

Sherlock Holmes

The preparation and filing of a debtor’s schedules of assets and liabilities is a routine but important aspect of nearly every bankruptcy case. A debtor’s schedules provide critical information to creditors and other parties in interest, the Office of the United States Trustee, and the bankruptcy court.

Today we’ll begin with a two-part question: When do you suppose you could (i) hold a debtor’s property hostage without running afoul of the automatic stay and (ii) also collect on an administrative expense for postpetition rent for leased space used to store such property?

If you don’t already know the answers to the above questions, perhaps an overview of a recent decision from the Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey will provide some insight.

Despite the initial glee of the prospect of a United States that was independent of Middle East oil, beginning in the fourth quarter of 2014, the price of oil started dropping precipitously.  As noted in a recent article, over 80 bankruptcies in the oil industry were filed in 2015, up 471 % over calendar year 2014.  

As energy prices continue in their trough and volatile markets fuel speculation of credit deterioration, more and more investors, companies, and professionals find themselves scouring documents to find room for a capital structure adjustment (or, alternatively, for potential threats to their credit support).  A recent decision by the District Court for the Southern District of New York in the Norske cas

Federal bankruptcy law can benefit debtors and creditors alike. Provisions such as the automatic stay and absolute priority ensure a streamlined proceeding, preserving the debtor’s scarce resources for business rehabilitation and creditor repayment.  The alternative, multiple state court debt enforcement actions, would waste the debtor’s time and money on litigation (as valuable as bankruptcy lawyers may be). 

In the latest installment of our “Breaking the Code” series, we take a look at the rarely-mentioned section 108(c) of the Bankruptcy Code, which governs the effect of certain deadlines relating to nonbankruptcy legal actions:

Typically, when an individual debtor files for bankruptcy, all of his or her belongings become part of the big “property of the estate” pot that the court ladles up pro rata among hungry creditors.  But debtors need to eat too.  Exemption law allows individual debtors and their families to keep some basic property, such as the clothes on their backs and roofs over their heads.

Section 109(a) of the Bankruptcy Code requires debtors to either reside or have a domicile, place of business, or property in the United States.  A split of authority exists whether a foreign debtor seeking recognition of its foreign proceeding under chapter 15 of the Bankruptcy Code must satisfy these requirements.&nb