The Ninth Circuit’s Bankruptcy Appellate Panel (BAP) recently upheld the disallowance of a credit union’s claims after the credit union’s “disgruntled employee” failed to file the proofs of claim before the claims bar date.
The case of Spokane Law Enforcement Federal Credit Union v. Barker (In re Barker) serves as a cautionary tale—reminding creditors and their attorneys of the importance of timely filing proofs of claim.
On March 4, 2014, a unanimous United States Supreme Court decided Law v. Siegel1 and clarified that exercising statutory or inherent powers, a bankruptcy court may not contravene specific statutory authority. Law will likely have broad implications for business bankruptcy cases even though it directly involved the exercise of a bankruptcy judge’s authority under section 105(a) to create a pragmatic solution to the actions of a bad actor in a consumer bankruptcy case.
A central purpose of bankruptcy is to grant debtors a fresh start – in bankruptcy terms, a “discharge” of existing debts. But not all debts are dischargeable. Bankruptcy Code § 523(a)(2)(A), for example, prevents the discharge of debts resulting from “false pretenses, a false representation, or actual fraud . . . .” What if a principal incurs a large debt based not on his own fraud, but on the fraud of his agent? Is that debt dischargeable? That was the question addressed recently by the Ninth Circuit Bankruptcy Appellate Panel inIn re Huh, BAP No.
Although property obtained by a debtor after filing for bankruptcy is usually safe from creditors, a recent case from the Ninth Circuit Bankruptcy Appellate Panel allowed a Chapter 7 Trustee to sell real property obtained by the debtors post-petition.
In Obsidian Finance Group, LLC v. Cox, Nos. 12-35238, 12-35319 (9th Cir. Jan. 17, 2014), the Ninth Circuit held that First Amendment protections under the Supreme Court’s landmark opinion in Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., 418 U.S.
The Ninth Circuit has extended an additional level of protection for company publications that take the form of blogs. In reference to the level of fault required to prove liability for an allegedly defamatory posting, the court explained that it is irrelevant whether a blogger is a member of an institutional press corps or a private entity.
The Ninth Circuit last week became the first federal court of appeals to find that bloggers are entitled to the same First Amendment protections as traditional print and broadcast media when sued for defamation. Obsidian Fin. Grp. v. Cox, -- F.3d --, 2014 WL 185376 (9th Cir. Jan. 17, 2014).
In a departure from other bankruptcy courts in the Third Circuit and her own recent prior opinion, U.S. Bankruptcy Chief Judge Mary France of the Middle District of Pennsylvania broadly interpreted the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Stern v. Marshall, 564 U.S. 2 (2011), and held that a bankruptcy court lacks the constitutional authority to issue a final judgment in any fraudulent transfer action where the defendant (i) has not filed a proof of claim and (ii) has not consented to the bankruptcy judge entering a final judgment on the matter.
In In re Louisiana Riverboat Gaming P’ship (Global Gaming Legends, LLC v. Legends Gaming of Louisana-1, LLC) (“Global Gaming”), the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Western District of Louisiana stayed discovery in an adversary proceeding pending decision on a party’s motion to withdraw the reference to the district court, finding too much risk that the bankruptcy court would later be found to be without authority to handle pre-trial discovery for the “Stern-governed” core claims at issue. Adv. Proc. No. 13AP-1007 (Bankr. W.D. La. Jan. 10, 2014).