In Executive Benefits Insurance Agency, petitioner vs. Peter H. Arkison, Chapter 7 Trustee, Case No. 12-1200, 573 U.S. __(2014) the United States Supreme Court ( Court) delivered its opinion as a follow up to its landmark decision in Stern v. Marshall. In Stern v.
This morning, the Supreme Court issued its hotly anticipated decision in Executive Benefits Insurance Agency v.
The Supreme Court of the United States announced decisions in three cases today:
On June 9, 2014, the United States Supreme Court issued a unanimous opinion in Exec. Benefits Ins. Agency, Inc. v. Arkison (In re Bellingham Ins. Agency, Inc.), 573 U.S. ___ (2014), affirming the Ninth Circuit and holding that, while the Constitution does not permit a bankruptcy court to issue a final ruling in certain circumstances, it is permitted to issue proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law to be reviewed de novo by the district court.
Since 1988, section 365(n) of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code has protected licensees of intellectual property from having their licenses rejected by an insolvent licensor. While this statute addresses certain contingencies and exceptions, the basic rule is that an insolvent licensor is not free to terminate (or ‘reject’) an intellectual property license the way it is free to shed itself of other contracts.
The U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware has affirmed a bankruptcy court order which approved both a sale of the debtors’ assets and the establishment of an escrow account, which essentially provides a “gift” to fund a distribution to the debtors’ unsecured creditors. What is significant about this order is that it approved the use of gifting in a chapter 11 bankruptcy case.
An executive’s right to severance payments isn’t always written in stone, even if his employer agrees to provide them. In this post, we described how one exec lost his severance pay after the Federal Reserve decided that his employer, a bank, was in a “troubled condition” at the time.
Recently, the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) filed a limited objection in bankruptcy court to the proposed sale of assets of ConnectEdu, Inc. (“ConnectEdu”) on the grounds that the company’s privacy policy protecting customer personal information had potentially not been complied with.
As one bankruptcy court has said, “[b]ecause deals are the heart and soul of the [c]hapter 11 process, bankruptcy courts enforce them as cut by the parties.” Unfortunately, however, deals do not always turn out as the parties expected and there is sometimes litigation to determine what exactly was bargained for in a chapter 11 plan.