Since May 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court has issued three decisions addressing or potentially impacting issues of bankruptcy law. These included rulings concerning the abrogation of sovereign immunity for Native American tribes under the Bankruptcy Code, and for instrumentalities of Puerto Rico under a similar statute enacted in 2016 allowing the Commonwealth to restructure its debts. The Court also handed down an opinion concerning a homeowner's entitlement to the surplus proceeds of a real estate tax foreclosure sale.

Whether a dispute that is subject to arbitration can or must be referred to arbitration after one of the parties to a prepetition arbitration agreement files for bankruptcy has long been a source of disagreement among bankruptcy and appellate courts due to a perceived conflict between the Federal Arbitration Act and the Bankruptcy Code. The U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Illinois recently provided some useful guidance regarding this issue.

To prevent "trafficking in corporate shells," the Bankruptcy Code prohibits any discharge of corporate or partnership debts if the debtor is not an "individual" and, in a chapter 11 case, if the debtor proposes a liquidating chapter 11 plan contemplating the cessation of the debtor's business following confirmation.

A bankruptcy trustee's ability to avoid and recover pre-bankruptcy preferential transfers is essential to preserving or augmenting the estate for the benefit of all stakeholders. In 2019, however, the Bankruptcy Code was amended to add a due diligence requirement to the Bankruptcy Code's preference avoidance provision, apparently as a way to minimize the volume of speculative and coercive preference litigation.

The High Court has considered the point at which the directors’ duty to consider the interests of creditors arose in the context of a tax mitigation scheme that ultimately failed

The judge found that the duty to consider creditors’ interests had arisen once the directors had become aware that there was a real risk that the scheme would fail and that the company would therefore be unable to pay its debts.

In Czyzewski v. Jevic Holding Corp., 137 S. Ct. 973 (2017), the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Bankruptcy Code does not allow bankruptcy courts to approve distributions to creditors in a "structured dismissal" of a chapter 11 case that violate the Bankruptcy Code's ordinary priority rules without the consent of creditors. However, because the Court declined to express any "view about the legality of structured dismissals in general," many open questions remain regarding the structured dismissal mechanism.

Until recently, the nature of ownership of assets on deposit with a third party was not controversial. If a local bank branch goes bankrupt, the cash or other assets deposited with the bank belonged to individual depositors/customers, safely out of the reach of the bank’s creditors, reinforced by numerous federal and state regulations, and bankruptcy case law.

But what happens if the asset that’s been deposited is cryptocurrency, held by a third-party, non-bank custodian?

In In re Golden Sphinx Ltd., 2023 WL 2823391 (Bankr. C.D. Cal. Mar. 31, 2023), the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California denied a motion filed by a creditor of a chapter 15 debtor seeking discovery from a bank that had provided financing to one of the debtor's affiliates.

On 17 July 2023, the Hon’ble Supreme Court delivered its judgement in Paschimanchal Vidyut Vitran Nigam Ltd. v. Raman Ispat Private Limited & Ors., 2023 SCC OnLine SC 842 (Raman Ispat). The specific issue of whether Paschimanchal Vidyut Vitran Nigam Ltd. (Appellant) could enforce a security interest created over the assets of Raman Ispat Private Limited (Corporate Debtor) outside of the liquidation proceedings under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016 (Code) was settled in the negative. More importantly, the Hon’ble Supreme Court confined the applicability of State Tax Officer v.

There is longstanding controversy concerning the validity of third-party release provisions in non-asbestos trust chapter 11 plans that limit the potential exposure of various non-debtor parties involved in the process of negotiating, implementing and funding a plan. In the latest chapter of this debate, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit handed down a long-awaited ruling regarding the validity of nonconsensual third-party releases in the chapter 11 plan of pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma, Inc. and its affiliated debtors (collectively, "Purdue").