April 17, 2009, will mark the three-and-one-half-year anniversary of the effective date of chapter 15 of the Bankruptcy Code, which was enacted as part of the comprehensive bankruptcy reforms implemented under the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005.

One of the hallmarks of chapter 11, and bankruptcy jurisprudence in general in the U.S., is the fundamental right of creditors and other stakeholders to have a meaningful voice in the proceedings concerning matters that affect their economic interests.

The strategic importance of classifying claims and interests under a chapter 11 plan is sometimes an invitation for creative machinations designed to muster adequate support for confirmation of the plan. Although the Bankruptcy Code unequivocally states that only “substantially similar” claims or interests can be classified together, it neither defines “substantial similarity” nor requires that all claims or interests fitting the description be classified together.

In its first bankruptcy decision of 2014 (October Term, 2013), the U.S. Supreme Court held on March 4, 2014, in Law v. Siegel, No. 12-5196 (Mar. 4, 2014) (available athttp://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/13pdf/12-5196_8mjp.pdf), that a bankruptcy court cannot impose a surcharge on exempt property due to a chapter 7 debtor's misconduct, acknowledging that the Supreme Court's decision may create "inequitable results" for trustees and creditors.

The world is getting smaller. The number of people who hop from country to country throughout their lives is increasing. Inevitably, when a jet-setting life becomes financially troubled, bankruptcy and other court proceedings are likely to be similarly international. Two cases involving the same parties were heard in both the High Court in London and the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. See Kemsley v Barclays Bank Plc & Ors [2013] EWHC 1274 (Ch) (15 May 2013), 2013 WL 1904308, and In re Kemsley, 489 B.R. 346 (Bankr. S.D.N.Y. 2013).

Chapter 11 debtors and sophisticated creditor and/or shareholder constituencies are increasingly using postpetition plan support agreements (sometimes referred to as “lockup” agreements) to set forth prenegotiated terms of a chapter 11 plan prior to the filing of a disclosure statement and a plan with the bankruptcy court. Under such lockup agreements, if the debtor ultimately proposes a chapter 11 plan that includes prenegotiated terms, signatories are typically obligated to vote in favor of the plan.

In 1988, Congress added section 365(n) to the Bankruptcy Code, which grants some intellectual property licensees the right to continued use of licensed property notwithstanding rejection of the underlying executory license agreement by a debtor or bankruptcy trustee. The addition came three years after the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Lubrizol Enters., Inc. v. Richmond Metal Finishers, Inc., 756 F.2d 1043 (4th Cir. 1985), that if a debtor rejects an executory intellectual property license, the licensee loses the right to use any licensed copyrights, trademarks, and patents.

Putting it mildly, the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling last year in Stern v. Marshall, 132 S. Ct. 56 (2011), cast a wrench into the day-to-day operation of U.S. bankruptcy courts scrambling to deal with a deluge of challenges—strategic or otherwise—to the scope of their “core” jurisdiction to issue final orders and judgments on a wide range of disputes. In Stern, the Court ruled that, to the extent that 28 U.S.C.

The ability of a bankruptcy court to reorder the priority of claims or interests by means of equitable subordination or recharacterization of debt as equity is generally recognized. Even so, the Bankruptcy Code itself expressly authorizes only the former of these two remedies. Although common law uniformly acknowledges the power of a court to recast a claim asserted by a creditor as an equity interest in an appropriate case, the Bankruptcy Code is silent upon the availability of the remedy in a bankruptcy case.

The enduring impact of the Great Recession on businesses, individuals, municipalities, and even sovereign nations has figured prominently in world headlines during the last three years. Comparatively absent from the lede, however, has been the plight of charitable and other nonprofit entities that depend in large part on the largesse of donors who themselves have been less able or less willing to provide eleemosynary institutions with badly needed sources of capital in the current economic climate.