Credit Slips

Welcome to David Lander

On behalf of all the regular contributors to Credit Slips, I wanted to welcome David Lander of St. Louis's Thompson Coburn as a guest blogger. Lander's work gives him a vantage point we don't often have on the blog. As a partner in Thompson Coburn, he represents some of the nation's largest and most well-known corporations. Lander teaches as an adjunct professor of law at St. Louis University, is chairman of the Foundation for Credit Education, and holds leadership positions in national professional organizations devoted to both business and consumer credit issues.

I've known David almost since I first became a law professor, way back .... well, let's just say for both our sakes, a few years ago. He is a thoughtful, careful practitioner of law and is a tremendous resource for many of us in the legal academy. It's a real honor and great to have him with us for a few days.

The Big 2 for the Slips

Today is the second anniversary of the launch of Credit Slips. We started this blog to have some fun and have been very gratified by the many readers who have found us. We are fortunate to have such an informed readership. The many blog comments help to make Credit Slips an even better source of information on bankruptcy and credit policy.

Looking at the numbers, we have had almost 600,000 page views, and those are just the ones we can track. We know many of you read us through news aggregators and other web services that do not show up in these hit counts. Those 600,000 page views came from 838 separate posts (make that 839 if you count this one). As of this moment, we're just a little short of 2,300 comments on those 838 posts.

It's been a great experience, and we'll keep writing if people will keep reading.

photo courtesy of stOOpidgErL at Flickr

Thank You Again, Professor Lipson

On behalf of all the Credit Slips bloggers, here is a big thank you to Professor Jonathan Lipson of Temple University for reprising his role as a guest blogger these past two weeks. Lipson is an insightful commentator on the corporate bankruptcy scene, and Credit Slips readers will want to keep an eye out for his study on examiners in large corporate reorganizations. Also, we really appreciate Lipson's summary of the Supreme Court's recent decision in Piccadilly. We were lucky Jonathan was writing for us when the decision came down. Thanks again, Jonathan, and come back soon.

Changing of the (Guest Blogger) Guard

Credit Slips thanks University of New Mexico law professor Nathalie Martin for joining us the past few weeks and giving us some "on the ground" perspective of how the credit crisis is affecting persons she sees in her legal clinic. Thanks again, Nathalie. Rejoining us as guest blogger now is Jonathan Lipson, a law professor at Temple University. Regular readers will remember Jonathan from from his guest blogging almost one year ago precisely. Welcome back, Jonathan.

Welcome Back to Nathalie Martin

Nathalie Martin, the Dickason Professor of Law at the University of New Mexico, will be joining us again as a guest blogger. Regular readers of Credit Slips will remember Professor Martin's guest blogging stint at the beginning of the year. She has spent the last semester in the University of New Mexico School of Law legal clinic. It seemed like a very good time to get her perspective again to hear what life is like on the front line during this credit crisis. Welcome back Nathalie.

Thank you to Judge Eugene Wedoff

The Credit Slips bloggers thank Judge Eugene Wedoff, U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Illinois, for his participation as a guest blogger last week. His posts identified a number of important consumer bankruptcy issues, including student loans, the means test, and the potential of rule-making to address issues in bankruptcy cases.  We are grateful to Judge Wedoff for being the first judge to participate in Credit Slips. The bankruptcy judges are on the front lines of addressing the problems of serious financial distress, and we have much to learn from their perspectives.

Many, Many Thanks to Mechele Dickerson

On behalf of all the regular Credit Slips bloggers, I wanted to express our deep appreciation to Associate Dean and Professor Mechele Dickerson. Her contributions were just superb. Professor Dickerson did a great job of blogging the Debtor World conference, bringing those papers and ideas to a wider audience. Also, in her first posts, Professor Dickerson discussed her most recent work on home ownership. Whether you agree or not, anyone with an interest in guiding this country toward a more coherent consumer credit regime must grapple with the issue Professor Dickerson raises about a housing policy that aims to put everyone into home ownership. Thanks again for all of your efforts, Mechele.

Hasta La Vista

Let me (again) thank the Credit Slips bloggers generally, and Bob Lawless specifically, for inviting me to be a guest blogger. I have never done this before and, and quite honestly the thought of blogging terrified me. But, had I not been so fearful of having nothing to say this week, I might not have listened as intently to the talks at the Debt conference. Periodically zoning out would have been a grave error as the conference was one of the best I’ve attended in my academic career.

So, let me also take the opportunity to thank Professor Lawless, Deans Ralph Brubaker and Charles Tabb, and Sam Gerdano (ABI) for organizing that event and for asking me to attend it.

With that, I bid you a fond farewell.

Welcome to Judge Eugene Wedoff

I'm delighted to introduce Eugene Wedoff, who will be the first judge to guest blog at Credit Slips. He is a judge in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Northern District of Illinois, a position that he has held since 1987. Last year, he concluded a five-year term as Chief Judge of that district. Judge Wedoff has overseen thousands of consumer and business bankruptcy cases, including the Chapter 11 reorganization bankruptcy of United Airlines. He has authored influential articles on the means testing, the provisions added to the Bankruptcy Code in 2005 to screen consumer debtors for eligibility for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Judge Wedoff is a member of all the prestigious bankruptcy professional organizations (each of which has their own fancy acronym (NCBJ, ABI, AMC, and NBRC)). He's one of the brightest minds in the world of bankruptcy, and I hope our readers will join me in welcoming him.

Live, From A Debt World

I just accomplished probably the most important thing I needed to do this morning.  I figured out how to log on the University of Illinois network.  Because I was a bit concerned that I would mess that up, I got here well before the first session -- just to be sure.  Since the U of IL and the ABI conference planners have made it impossible for me not to be able to blog this conference, once things get going, I'll be back with something a bit more substantive.

Congrats to Professor Warren!

What do B.B. King, Justice John Paul Stevens, University of Illinois chancellor Richard Herman, and Credit Slips blogger Elizabeth Warren have in common? They were all named today as part of the 2008 class of fellows for the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. This is a major, major accomplishment. Congratulations, Elizabeth!

Welcome to Mechele Dickerson

Credit Slips would like to welcome Professor Mechele Dickerson as a guest blogger. Dickerson is the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and the Fulbright & Jaworski Professor of Law at the University of Texas School of Law. She is a widely known and respected scholar of bankruptcy law. Her current paper, forthcoming in the Indiana Law Journal is entitled "The Myth of Home Ownership, and Why Home Ownership Is Not Always a Good Thing," and I am sure we will hear little bit about that work. As an academic dean, Professor Dickerson also is uniquely situated to talk about how bankruptcy and credit is covered in the university classroom. At the end of the week, Professor Dickerson is joining us here in Champaign for "A Debtor World: An Interdisciplinary Academic Symposium on Debt," and she may have a few contributions for those of you who are unable to join us. Welcome to Credit Slips, Mechele.

Light Blogging

Our regular readers might have noticed the very light blogging this week. Sorry about that. Events conspired to keep the regular Credit Slips bloggers really busy this week at our day jobs. I have some really cool graphs on state variation in the bankruptcy filing rate I'll write up soon over the weekend.

Welcome to Paige Marta Skiba and Jeremy Tobacman

Credit Slips welcomes Paige Marta Skiba, a behavioral economist who studies payday lending. She earned her Ph.D in economics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2007 and is currently an assistant (corrected 6/24/08) professor of law at Vanderbilt Law School. She'll be joined in some or all her posts by her frequent co-author, Jeremy Tobacman, who is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Economics at Oxford University. Their current research uses a dataset from a payday lender with two million loan records to examine questions about the profitability of payday lenders, the relationship between payday borrowing and bankruptcy, and consumer behavior in payday-loan borrowing and default. With financial distress on the rise in America, payday lending looks like a growth industry. We look forward to reading more about their findings and thank them in advance for sharing their behavioral economics perspective on consumer borrowing.

Welcome to the Blogosphere: Less Than the Least

Professors David Skeel (Penn, Law) and Bill Stuntz (Harvard, Law) have started Less than the Least. Skeel and Stuntz say they will write about what interests them personally and professionally. Thus, Credit Slips readers may want to check out this new blog. Bankruptcy types will know Professor Skeel's work and his history of United States bankruptcy law, Debt's Dominion. One of Skeel's first posts discusses his take as an evangelical Christian on Senator Durbin's proposal to give bankruptcy judges the power to modify home mortgages, a proposal that Credit Slips blogger Katie Porter discussed earlier this morning.

Thanks, Christian

Christian Weller has given us a very stimulating week. His big picture perspective on the economy, debt, deflation, and debt overhang has been made even more frightening by the data he cites.  I don't sleep well when I read Christian's work.  But I think it isn't more sleep that's needed right now.

Thanks for sharing your ideas with us, Christian.

A Face for Radio

If readers will excuse a little self-promotion, I wanted to say that I'll be on Focus 580 with David Inge on WILL-AM. The program is scheduled for tomorrow morning, February 19, at 11:00 AM (CST). We'll be talking about the credit crisis. If you're in the Champaign-Urbana area, you can hear it on 580 AM. If you're not inclined to travel to the Illinois prairie even to hear compelling public radio such as this, WILL-AM streams their broadcasts here.

Welcome, Christian Weller

It is my special pleasure to welcome Dr. Christian Weller to Credit Slips. First the formal stuff:  Dr. Weller is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts Boston, a research scholar at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a Senior Fellow at Center for American Progress. A trained economist, he has also worked in policy positions in the US and Germany and in banking in Germany, Belgium and Poland. 

Now the stuff about his important contributions: Christian's expertise is in the area of retirement income security, macroeconomics, money and banking, and international finance. His work is numbers driven, but it is also quite readable. Check out his work here and here. 

Finally, the stuff that makes him really interesting: Christian's ideas are well-grounded both in data and theory, but they are also fresh and powerful. He is one of the best lunch dates around.  His posts on Credit Slips will give us all a chance to visit with him. Welcome, Christian.

Thanks to Jean Braucher

Although the caption of this post is self-explanatory, we just wanted to emphasize how much we enjoyed having Jean Braucher post for us this past week and hope you did so too.  Jean's intellectual travels from Canada to Australia show she's willing to leave no stone unturned in her attempt to see how we can do things better in the American consumer bankruptcy world.

Thank you to Jim White and Welcome to Jean Braucher

It's Monday, and we have a changing of the guard. We wanted to thank Professor James J. White of the University of Michigan Law School for joining us last week. Professor White now holds the Credit Slips record for most comments for his post offering a libertarian perspective on the home mortgage crisis.

Beginning today and for the rest of the week, we will be joined by University of Arizona law professor Jean Braucher. In addition to an extensive body of work on bankruptcy law, Professor Braucher also teaches and writes about contract law and has written an number of articles about software contracts, including those fine-print licenses we find after we open the shrink-wrap. We look forward to her contributions.

Welcome to Jim White

Does your employer (like mine) not give you MLK Day off?  Well, then Credit Slips has just the solution to your woes: reading the musings of our newest guest blogger, Prof. James J. White.  Good law nerds will be well acquainted with his celebrated co-authored treatise, but for those who need an introduction, Jim has been one of the nation's leading commercial law academics since, well,I don't know -- maybe the McKinley Administration?  In any event, how long he's been writing is not important.  What's important is that he's an insightful and provocative scholar.  I'm sure he'll provide a soothing tonic for those who fear the tone of this blog sometimes drifts toward the liberal end of the political spectrum...

Thank You to Nathalie Martin

The Credit Slips crew wants to thank Professor Nathalie Martin, of the University of New Mexico School of Law for joining us a guest blogger. Professor Martin attracted some attention around the blogosphere with her post on the reality of how collection law treats Social Security benefits and other public benefits. She does a lot of great work on financial literacy and education, and we hope our readers benefited from hearing about her efforts. Her post about her colleagues' reaction to one of her financial education seminars is a classic.

Requests for Help

Maybe it's the growing mortgage crisis ... maybe it's the blog's growing readership ... maybe it's a little of both. But, we seem to be getting more direct inquiries from people facing legal troubles. It seemed a good time to remind everyone of what we say on the policies page:

We do not provide legal advice, and nothing on this site should be construed as legal advice. We are not all even lawyers. Those of us who are lawyers can get in trouble for giving advice outside the states where we are licensed. Being in debt can be very stressful, and we understand the desire to reach out for help. Please do not contact us for advice because we cannot help you.

It pains me to turn people away, but neither myself or anyone else connected with the Credit Slips blog is in a position to help. I'm sorry if you have contacted one of us, and we have not gotten back to you, but those of us with legal training are just not set up to help people with their individual legal problems. In any event, the legal profession is regulated, and we're not allowed to give out advice in places where we are not licensed. For regulatory reasons, many of us are on inactive status in places where we are admitted to the bar. Finally, we are not familiar with local practices in jurisdictions around the country, and you're better off with someone who is.

Welcome Back, Adam . . . Glad You Can Stay This Time!

Credit Slips is very happy to announce that Georgetown law professor Adam Levitin has agreed to join us as a regular contributor. Readers may remember that Professor Levitin did a guest blogging stint back in September 2007. Although Professor Levitin has only recently joined the Georgetown faculty, his papers already have made him a well-known figure in the legal academy, and he promises to be an influential voice on issues related to credit and bankruptcy. Professor Levitin's research interests include an emphasis on financial institutions and their regulation, an area that will add to and complement many of the topics we discuss on Credit Slips. Professor Levitin's SSRN page shows his prolific contribution to these areas already in his career.

Welcome, Adam, to Credit Slips. We're looking forward to your contributions.

Best Wishes for the New Year

On behalf of the Credit Slips crew, I wanted to wish all of our readers best wishes for the new year. Our blogging has been a little light the past week, but we'll pick it back up after the holidays. Be looking for guest blogger updates from the scholarly happenings related to credit and bankruptcy at the Association of American Law Schools annual meeting.

Also, I wanted to update our readers on the problem with the comments. Two weeks ago, Typepad had been having problems with a new spam filter as I mentioned here. Those problems seem to be fixed, and we have not had any recent problems with comments not appearing on this site. Typepad addressed the overall situation with a nice update and apology here. I really appreciated that and wish more companies would follow this straight-forward approach with their customers--"Sorry, we made a mistake, and we've fixed it."

That approach is much more likely to keep me as a customer than . . . oh, I don't know . . . shipping my mother's Christmas present in a box that looks like it came through a war zone, breaking the contents inside, refusing to simply exchange the present for the precise same item in the local store, charging me more sales tax to exchange the item because the in-store return policy is different than the return policy for online purchases, and then not even offering a simply "we're sorry for your trouble."

Spam Filter Trapping Comments

We've heard from a number of readers that our blog hosting service's comment-blocking software--er, I mean spam filter has been blocking legitimate comments. This seems to be a universal problem with Typepad blogs that they claim to have fixed, see here. If you have problems going forward with comments, let me know.

UPDATE (12/20 morning): Although Typepad said they believed they had made a change that would stop most comments from being trapped by the spam filter, we continue to have problems. When I got to the office this morning, there were three comments sitting in the spam filter that I had to released. I've notified Typepad, as they requested, and hopefully we'll get a fix soon. In the meantime, be aware that any comment that gets trapped as spam is not deleted. Rather, it sits in a queue where I have to individually release the comments. I'll try to keep on top of that queue as much as my schedule allows.

Live Blog Conversation on Mortgage/Bankruptcy Amendments

This morning, beginning at 10:00 AM 11:00 AM EST (in the U.S.), there will be a live blog discussion over at TPM Cafe's Warren Reports on the Middle Class. This discussion will feature  Congressman Brad Miller and Credit Slips own Elizabeth Warren. I've been asked to provide some commentary along with former Credit Slips guest blogger, Professor Adam Levitin of Georgetown.

UPDATE: My original post was up for a few minutes with the wrong time -- it's 11:00 AM EST.

Welcome to Nathalie Martin

Credit Slips wants to welcome Professor Nathalie Martin as a guest blogger. We're going to do something a little different. She had planned to guest blog beginning January 4, updating the world on the bankrupt happenings of the Association of American Law Schools annual meeting. Wait, that did not come out too well--adjective trouble. I meant Professor Martin was going to update us on the papers and scholarly events at the Association of American Law Schools annual meeting as they relate to credit and bankruptcy. But, she had a few timely posts on the mortgage crisis and the bankruptcy legislation pending in Congress, so I prevailed upon her to make a few posts while that subject matter was current.

Professor Martin was the American Bankruptcy Institute Scholar in Residence during the fall of 2005, when the new bankruptcy law became effective. In that capacity, she gave numerous media interviews and provided advice about the effects of the new law. Thus, with another bankruptcy law pending in Congress, Professor Martin seems particularly well positioned to offer some insights on whether the proposals in Congress would do anything to help alleviate the mortgage crisis.

Professor Martin is the Dickason Professor of Law at the University of New Mexico as well as the director of the school's Economic Development Program. With one foot in the classroom and one foot in the real world, I always enjoy sitting down with Professor Martin to hear how the law is affecting people on the ground. Martin is a former chair of the Association of American Law Schools Section on Creditors' and Debtors' Rights and has written several books on bankruptcy. We look forward to her contributions.

Still Here

The blogging has been light over the past few days, but we're still here. Credit Slips is something we do in our spare time, away from our regular jobs as teachers and scholars. The crush of many other obligations--traveling to conferences, preparing papers and lectures, and just running a law school--seems to have caught up with all of us at about the same time. Also, all of the regular Credit Slips bloggers have been working collaboratively on a major research project. Watch this space for an announcement.

Thank You to John Rao

I have been dilatory in not thanking John Rao of the National Consumer Law Center for his series of postings here on Credit Slips. Rao was able to provide an "in the trenches" perspective on a number of important bankruptcy and credit issues. His post on the new IRS guidelines and how they will affect bankruptcy practice raises important issues about the administration of bankruptcy law. Unlike many technical areas of law, bankruptcy always has lacked an intermediating, interpretive agency between the statute and the courts. The U.S. Trustee Program may be stepping into that role, and Rao's post illustrates how that dynamic may be occurring.

Just to single out of one his other great posts, Rao also discussed the pending legislation to change the stripdown rules for home mortgages in chapter 13. I was initially skeptical that legislation would gain the support it needed to make its way through Congress, but the bill seems to be picking up steam. We will try to keep you posted on the political outlook for that bill as it moves through Congress. If you want to offer your own assessment about whether that bill has a chance of becoming law, the comments are open.

Thanks to John Armour, Welcome to John Rao

This week, we welcome John Rao as a guest blogger. Rao is a staff attorney with the National Consumer Law Center who focuses on bankruptcy and consumer credit issues. He is a national leader in his field, and his contributions are widely known across the community of bankruptcy professionals. We welcome the perspectives of this well-known practitioner.

Also, we wanted to extend our thanks to John Armour, the Lovells Professor of Law & Finance at Oxford University. Armour joined us for the past two weeks, offering his thoughts from a UK perspective on corporate bankruptcy matters. We hope that our readers found his contributions insightful, and perhaps we introduced Armour's excellent work to a new audience. Credit Slips readers will want to keep an eye out for Armour's massive empirical study of insolvency laws across countries.

Comings & Goings

The beginning of October marks a coming and going for our guest bloggers. First, we would like to thank Professor Adam Levitin of the Georgetown University Law Center for joining us the past two weeks. Levitin has been doing some interesting work at the intersection of payment systems and consumer credit policy. His posts showed how we cannot have a good understanding of consumer credit without understanding the incentives that payment systems create, especially the point that the current U.S. systems do not require users to internalize the costs of their choice of payments systems. Levitin will be an important voice in these fields for many years to come, and Credit Slips readers will want to follow his work. Also, Professor Levitin was recently named the recipient for the Editors' Prize for Best Article in the 2007 volume of the American Bankruptcy Law Journal for this article, "Towards a Federal Common Law of Bankruptcy: Judicial Lawmaking in a Statutory Regime." (An SSRN version of the paper can be found here.)

Joining us for the coming week is John Armour, the Lovells Professor of Law & Finance at Oxford University. Armour is widely published in the areas of corporate and bankruptcy law. He is especially interested in the effects of insolvency law on a country's economic system. Armour is in the middle of a massive empirical project capturing legal change in insolvency laws across many different countries. I always have found Armour's articles to be quite insightful and had the pleasure of finally meeting him last spring. We were thrilled when he agreed to join us a guest blogger, and we are sure our readers will welcome his contributions.

Welcome to Adam Levitin

Credit Slips welcomes Adam Levitin as a guest blogger for the coming week. Professor Levitin is an associate professor of law at Georgetown University and a new face in the legal academy. He is already a prolific scholar, as a quick perusal of his SSRN page will show. His interests are widespread in the area of bankruptcy, having written on everything from equitable subordination to the credit card company/merchant relationship to statutory interpretation. Levitin has a number of interesting things to say about bankruptcy and credit topics in the news, and we hope you enjoy his contributions.

Thank You to Emily Kadens

On behalf of everyone at Credit Slips, I wanted to thank Emily Kadens for joining us as a guest blogger. Her careful attention to the historical record helps us understand the origins of modern bankruptcy, and we hope our readers appreciated these new perspectives. I would especially commend her post on state control of pre-modern bankruptcy. To the modern (U.S.) mind, bankruptcy is something the government does in a courtroom. The functional aspects of bankruptcy--marshaling of assets, payment of creditors, and possibly debt forgiveness--need not necessarily be state functions. In this post and in her other posts throughout the week, Professor Kadens reminded us that bankruptcy need not necessarily be exclusively a state function.

Welcome to Emily Kadens

On behalf of all the Credit Slips bloggers, I would like to welcome Professor Emily Kadens as a guest blogger to these pages. Professor Kadens is at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law, and she specializes in European legal history and commercial law. Currently, she is working on the history of bankruptcy in pre-modern England and France. I had the pleasure of listening to Professor Kadens provide a lunchtime lecture at a conference I attended a few months back and immediately hoped that she would share her perspectives with the Credit Slips audience. We were all thrilled when she agreed. Professor Kadens has a law degree and an M.A. from the University of Chicago, a Ph.D. in history from Princeton, and a diploma in medieval studies from the Université Catholique de Louvain. She has just finished her second year on the faculty at UT, but we're all  looking forward to her academic contributions for years to come. This week, Professor Kadens will give us insightful historical perspectives on the subjects that are near and dear to our heart here on Credit Slips.

We're OK, Folks

If you were looking for us on Tuesday afternoon (July 24), we were knocked offline by a power outage in downtown San Francisco. See here for more details on the outage. The Credit Slips bloggers are in Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Ohio. But our blog hosting service is in San Francisco, and it was affected along with several other Internet services. We live in quite an interconnected world.

Happy Birthday to Us

Today is the one-year anniversary of the launch of Credit Slips. We started this blog as a supplement to our research and teaching, all of us having interests in policy and regulatory issues on debt and bankruptcy. We have especially appreciated our friends who have joined as guest bloggers for a week or so. Their contributions have been uniformly insightful and have added new perspectives to the blog.

As I think back on the year, blogging has been a great experience. The biggest surprise to me has been the wide audience we have found. It's been great to have our work reach an audience who might not otherwise have seen it. In return, I have had my own work enriched by the interactions and reactions to our blog content. Academic journals run my life, but I would like to think my academic work is better for being informed by everyday reality. Although I only want to speak for myself on that point, I suspect the other regular Credit Slips bloggers would agree.

The biggest challenge has been to keep Credit Slips going as part of our day job. We're supposed to push back the frontiers of knowledge--inside joke with a friend who always would respond "yeah, but in what direction"--with our research and teaching. It's not entirely clear where Credit Slips fits into that. It's more than a personal hobby, but it ain't quite research or teaching. Nevertheless, we'll keep writing, if you'll keep reading.

What will the future hold for Credit Slips? Right now, I think we will continue to do more of what we have been doing. Our goal never has been to be a comprehensive source of news on credit and bankruptcy issues. We'll keep commenting on what we see that interests us from our research and teaching. We'll keep having guest bloggers who add new perspectives. We'll also keep trying new things, keep those that work and get rid of those that don't. All of us recently met, and our sense was that Credit Slips was generally going in a good direction. If there is something we can do to make the site better, please feel welcome to say so in the comments. We'll do our best to keep improving Credit Slips, within the limits of what we can do and still keep these great day jobs we all have.

So, have a cupcake to celebrate. If you follow the suggestion in the graphic and put one candle in it, the calories won't count.

Thank You to Professor Arias and Welcome to Professor Barr

All of the regular bloggers at Credit Slips want to thank Professor F. Javier Arias Varona for joining us from Spain's Universidad Rey Juan Carlos. It has been a delight to have Professor Arias offer his perspectives on consumer credit and bankruptcy. It is a paradox but true that we can learn a lot about local institutions and laws by looking afar. Professor Arias reminded us that, as U.S. consumer credit and bankruptcy policy has drifted toward less generous debt forgiveness, many of the EU countries (although not yet Arias's home country of Spain) have adopted more generous bankruptcy laws.

That was the going. The coming is that we would like to welcome Professor Michael Barr of the University of Michigan as a guest blogger. Professor Barr has been doing outstanding work for several years on the Detroit Area Study on Financial Services. This study examines the use of financial services by low- and moderate-income households (see here for much more information). All of Professor Barr's work is top-notch, and I recommend his work to those interested in the sorts of issues we cover on Credit Slips (see here for his publication list). On behalf of the regular Credit Slips bloggers, I wanted to welcome him to the site, and thank him for what I am sure will be a series of posts with new perspectives coming out of his work.

Thank You and a Welcome

First, we have to thank Oren Bar-Gill of New York University School of Law for taking the time to share his thoughts with us. Bar-Gill has already made important contributions to our understanding of how consumers make decisions surrounding consumer credit. I hope Credit Slips readers enjoyed his original and creative ideas about possible reforms to the consumer credit market.

Second, we want to welcome Professor Francisco Javier Arias Varona of the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, Spain. Professor Arias will spend some time with us, offering Credit Slips readers an European perspective on consumer credit and bankruptcy. The Spanish experience with both consumer credit and consumer bankruptcy is far different than what we have seen in the United States. We hope Credit Slips readers will find his comparative views both informative in their own right and also helpful in assessing possible reforms both in the U.S. and Europe.

Welcome to Oren Bar-Gill

Credit Slips is pleased to welcome Professor Oren Bar-Gill as a guest blogger. Professor Bar-Gill works out of the law & economics school and studies problems of behavioral economics. He has an impressive body of work on the law & economics of contract and contracting, where takes a more nuanced approach than the simple assumption that humans rationally act to maximize utility all the time. He has turned these insights to the consumer credit area. In "Seduction by Plastic," 98 Northwestern Law Review 1373 (2004), he explored how competition induces consumer lenders to systematically exploit borrowers' cognitive biases, especially the tendency to underestimate future borrowing. As he wrote in the article's abstract, "More broadly, the credit card case study demonstrates that pricing patterns can be used as indicators of a behavioral market failure, signaling a potential role for legal intervention." We thank him for taking the time to add his insights to Credit Slips.

Offline Saturday AM

There's a note from Typepad, our blog hosting service, that it will be offline Saturday morning (June 30) from 2:00 AM CDT until approximately 4:00 AM CDT. Credit Slips will be unavailable for reading or posting during that time. If this changed anyone's plans for 2 - 4 AM this coming Saturday morning, you need to seriously reconsider your life choices.

Thank You Jonathan Lipson!

On behalf of all the Credit Slips regulars, I wanted to thank Jonathan Lipson for joining us last week. Jonathan has written and thought a lot about the intersection of corporate governance principles and financial distress. We appreciated his posts on the recent and important Gheewalla decision of the Delaware Supreme Court about the zone of corporate insolvency and directors' duties (or lack thereof). During his blogging stint with us, Jonathan did not mention his recent online response to an article in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review that advocated paying CEOs of reorganizing corporations with corporate debt. Jonathan makes several persuasive points about why this proposal is not needed, and I commend Jonathan's response to those interested in this topic. It can be found here.

In the next several weeks, we will have some more guest bloggers. Oren Bar-Gill of NYU law school will be joining us to talk about behaviorial biases that affect the consumer credit markets. Javier Arias of the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos will be joining us to offer a Spanish/European perspective on consumer credit and bankruptcy. Also, Michael Barr of the University of Michigan Law School will guest blog to talk about his empirical work on financial services for low- and middle-income households.

Thank you to Keith Kilty

I want to extend a sincere thank you to Keith Kilty for guest blogging on Credit Slips this past week. Hearing from scholars in a variety of disciplines is always exciting. I also want to congratulate Keith on the arrival of his new grandson and his recent retirement. I'm sure he will enjoy both!

Welcome to Professor Lipson

Credit Slips readers are in for a treat this week.  Our guest blogger will be Prof. Jonathan C. Lipson, yet another bankruptcy law expert.  Unlike many academics who purport to have expertise in the field of bankruptcy, Prof. Lipson (on faculty at Temple but currently visiting at Penn) actually practiced law before he entered the academy.  It would be difficult to sum up his current research focus; he has such catholic interests as "constitutional exceptionalism" of bankruptcy law, ecclesiastical bankruptcies, executive compensation, and (one of my favorites) the role of the examiner in Chapter 11.  He also writes good stuff on Article 9 and other commercial law to boot.  Enjoy!

Welcome to guest blogger, Professor Keith Kilty

I am so pleased to introduce and welcome Keith Kilty as this week's guest blogger. Keith is professor in the College of Social Work at The Ohio State University, and has studied and written on numerous aspects of social inequality, including poverty, race, gender, and social class. Keith has also served as vice president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems and co-editor of the Journal of Poverty: Innovations on Social, Political & Economic Inequalities. As a social scientist, Keith will share with us a unique perspective on several issues that are directly and indirectly related to bankruptcy. Again, I want to welcome Keith. I admire his work and look forward to reading his posts over the course of the week.

Many Thanks to Stephen Lubben

We have appreciated the contributions of Stephen Lubben this week. Stephen has joined Credit Slips as a guest blogger from his day job as the Daniel J. Moore Professor of Law at Seton Hall University. He brought us back to the "Why and Whether Delaware" debate, which is an important issue for corporate bankruptcy law. I am sure we'll see Stephen's contributions in our comments from time to time. He is a good friend of this blog. Thanks, Stephen.

Welcome to Stephen Lubben

Credit Slips is pleased to welcome Stephen Lubben as a guest blogger. Stephen is the Daniel J. Moore Professor of Law at Seton Hall University and an expert corporate reorganizations, including chapter 11 bankruptcy. I first met Stephen a number of years ago, and he immediately impressed me as an academic on the rise. His papers are careful, analytical, and empirically based. He writes without an agenda and is not afraid to take on conventional wisdom. He also proves that nice guys don't have to finish last. Currently, Stephen is in the final stages of a major empirical project on chapter 11 professional fees. I suspect he will have a lot to say about professional fees and plenty of other chapter 11 issues.

Stephen currently has a paper on the Social Science Research Network called Delaware's Irrelevance about whether large corporate reorganizations filed in Delaware have a higher refiling rate than elsewhere. For the uninitiated, that issue has been a huge topic of debate in bankruptcy circles. Stephen challenges both sides of the debate, and I hope we hear more about his work in the coming week.

Merci, Danke, Thanks to Kilborn

While I don't generally think of Easter as a snowy holiday -- and I grew up in Canada -- I was brought some cheer from this cold snap by reading Jason Kilborn's wonderful Credit Slips posts this week.  He remains one of the most interesting and diligent U.S. scholars of comparative consumer insolvency; we were lucky to have him join us.

Welcome to Jason Kilborn

Credit Slips is pleased to welcome Jason Kilborn as a guest blogger. Kilborn is a visiting assistant professor of law at the University of North Dakota and a leading expert on comparative consumer bankruptcy -- a topic on which he has a forthcoming book with Carolina Academic Press. His writings include comparative studies about countries including Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, France, and Germany. Kilborn also has taught at Texas, Lousiana State, and Chapman. He always draws lessons from United States law for other countries and what lessons other countries' bankruptcy laws have for the United States. We have had several blog posts on the globalization of consumer credit, and we look forward to Kilborn's insights on the topic.

Thank you to Tara Twomey

CreditSlips thanks Tara Twomey for her insightful posts this week. She highlighted a number of cutting-edge issues in consumer bankruptcy and mortgage lending from her unique perspective as both an academic and an advocate. Tara has years of experience as a clinical instructor and is currently an adjunct at Stanford Law School, where she teaches Community Economic Development. She is also a practicing lawyer, currently directing the Amicus Project for the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys. The list of recent and pending NACBA briefs provides a nice overview of hot issues for consumer practitioners after BAPCPA. After reading Tara's posts, I'm looking forward to catching up with her in person at the Federal Reserve's conference on Financing Community Development which will be held in Washington D.C. this week.

Introduction

Thanks to Credit Slips for having me "on" this week. Between BAPCPA and foreclosures there is certainly no shortage of things to talk about. This week I will share some thoughts on both and hopefully in the process highlight some lesser known, but important issues. I welcome and look forward to your comments.

Thank You to David Yen

I'm a day behind, but I wanted to thank David Yen for joining us as a guest blogger. He came with a wealth of experience to offer our readers, and I hope you enjoyed his posts. We all learned that there is at least one judge with a suggested reading list. On a more serious note, Yen highlighted the important legal issues at the intersection of immigration and consumer credit law. If you're interested in consumer credit at a policy level, those two topics can intersect in troubling ways and merit further attention. Thank you again, David, for taking the time out of your busy schedule to make those posts.

Welcome to David Yen

Credit Slips is pleased to welcome David Yen as a guest blogger this week. Yen is the bankruptcy supervisory attorney for the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago.Yen has worked for legal services programs and represented low-income clients in New York, Alabama, and Illinois. In 1992, he received an Equal Justice Award for his creativity in use of bankruptcy to help low-income clients. Put simply, the world needs more lawyers like David Yen.

The Credit Slips regulars came to know Yen through his always insightful posts on the Bankr-L listserv, and we knew he could add ideas to this site that we do not normally voice. Yen has an "in the trenches" perspective to what is happening with the bankruptcy law and with low-income consumers more generally. We are honored to have him join us and share his thoughts.

Thank You to Ted Janger & Susan Block-Lieb

We wanted to thank Ted Janger and Susan Block-Lieb for taking the time to guest blog here on Credit Slips. In their third post on the Myth of the Rational Borrower, they did something we need to do more of--use more figures. Their graphs and charts well illustrated their point. We actually looked like a web site when that post was at the top! The blog is run by academics whose disciplines value words over figures, but we'll maybe try to break out the crayons and draw a few pictures.

We sincerely appreciate Ted and Susan's contributions. Their work raises serious questions about the applicability of the "rational actor" model of decision making for consumer credit purchasing decisions, and it was great to hear the projects they currently have underway.

This Has Been Fun

Thank you to Bob and the other folks at Credit Slips for letting us post here last week.  Thanks also to our readers -- it was fun to know that you exist.  This is a new form of writing for both of us, and we've enjoyed it tremendously.  Let us welcome David.  We hope he enjoys blogging as much as we did, and we look forward to his posts.  Ta ta.

Welcome to David Moss

This week, Credit Slips is honored to welcome David Moss, the John G. McLean Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. Professor Moss first came to the attention of many bankruptcy law scholars when he published "The Rise of Consumer Bankruptcy: Evolution, Revolution, or Both?,"  76 American Bankruptcy Law Journal 73 (1999) with Gibbs A. Johnson. The article won the Editor's Prize for best article in the American Bankruptcy Law Journal that year, and it is well worth reading for anyone interested in the increase in consumer bankruptcy filings and consumer debt.

It is the fate of most any scholar who has an article that crosses disciplines that the "other" discipline will come to know you by the one interdisciplinary article. This is unfair because it does not recognize the scholar's substantial body of work, all of which is certainly the case with Professor Moss. He is an important voice on the issue of the government's approach to private sector risk. In addition to numerous scholarly articles, he has published two books and has a third on the way. His 2002 book, When All Else Fails: Government as the Ultimate Risk Manager is a historical exploration of the government's role as the insurer of last resort, tying together policy issues as seemingly disparate as airline bailouts and consumer protection laws. This topic includes bankruptcy law as well. Professor Moss has a new book forthcoming from the Harvard Business School Press, A Concise Guide to Macroeconomics: What Managers, Executives, and Students Need to Know. Perhaps Professor Moss can give us a few sentences on this new book and whether it will be useful to the Credit Slips audience.

Introduction

Hello to the readers of Credit Slips.  Thank you to John Pottow for that generous introduction, and to Bob Lawless and the regular Credit Slips authors for loaning us their bully pulpit.  To keep things simple we will both be posting from the same account.  So, if we understand the technology properly, all posts will look like they are coming from both of us.  We're comfortable with that.  That's why we teamed up.  In many cases the jointness will be accurate.  Where it's not, we'll  decide whether we wish to be clear about which one of us is posting.

We expect to post on a variety of topics over the course of the week from consumer credit and bankruptcy reform, to data privacy in bankruptcy, to debtor education and financial literacy, to international bankruptcy, but we're new at this, so who knows where it will lead. 

We look forward to your comments and to a lively, thoughtful discussion.

Ted and Susan

Welcome to Professors Block-Lieb and Janger

Credit Slips is delighted to welcome the talented stylings of Block, Lieb & Janger (which is how I think their names should be if they formed a firm) for the upcoming week as our Guest Bloggers.  I am especially excited because I am a fan of both Professor Susan Block-Lieb of Fordham Law School and Professor Edward (Ted) Janger  of Brooklyn Law School.  Why?  Not just because I'm a bankruptcy geek -- as, proudly, are they, too -- but because I like their scholarship, both individually (where they have both written on a subject area close to my heart, cross-border insolvency) and jointly (where they have a nice piece in the Texas Law Review struggling to reconcile bankruptcy reform with insights from consumer behavioralism -- forthcoming, oxymoronically, in the May 2006 issue).  I last saw Susan and Ted in Brooklyn, where we all participated in Ted's excellent academic conference, which I called Bankruptcy in the Global Village, "The Revenge" -- because it was the decade-later gathering of the seminal conference, Bankruptcy in the Global Village.  They are two of the most interesting and independent scholarly voices in bankruptcy law today, in my opinion; I think we are most lucky to have them as visitors.  And with expectations thus set unachievably high, please enjoy their week...

A Big Thank You to Jack Ayer

Thank you to Jack Ayer for serving as such a wonderful guest blogger over the past week and a half. We have tried to find guest bloggers that offer perspectives beyond those being offered by us regular Credit Slips type. Ayer's wonderful and eclectic posts have certainly done that. He (re)introduced us to a some great literary characters. Insert your favorite Balzac joke here. We hope that he had as much fun writing all of that as we had reading it. For more of Ayer's never-dull writings, check out http://underbelly-buce.blogspot.com/.

Beginning the week of January 22, we will be joined by bankruptcy law Professors Susan Block-Lieb (Fordham) and Ted Janger (Brooklyn). The following week we will have Professor David Moss from the Harvard Business School.

Thank You, I Love You, You've Been a Wonderful Audience

(And exit, to cheers and applause).  This is my last post at CreditSlips--or, more precisely, this was.  It remains only to express my apprection to the whole crew for letting me noodle with the equipment while the grownups were away, and to have a chance to move some stuff off my desk into a good home -- and for directing an impressive bunch of new readers to Underbelly, the primo blog for issues of attention surplus disorder.  Oh, and not at all least, to Bob Lawless for that cool introduction, which left some of my nearest and dearest in a state of gobsmacked astonishment.

Meanwhile, don't be a stranger.  Come visit us often, and in particular, come now: you are just in time for The Bucies.

Welcome to Jack Ayer

For the next week or so, Credit Slips is privileged to be joined by Jack Ayer, Professor of Law Emeritus, at the University of California-Davis. The "or so" part is because we're pretty informal about that sort of stuff. We're currently taking bets on how long it takes Ayer to realize he has made a terrible mistake by associating with the likes of us. The over/under is seven days.

When I first became a law professor, I attended a conference where Ayer presented a paper entitled "Through Chapter 11 with Gun or Camera, But Probably Not Both: A Field Guide" (available at 72 Washington University Law Quarterly 883 (1994)). The author's footnote includes the following: "This paper was made possible in part by a grant from the Dean's summer research fund at UC-Davis. It was made impossible in part by my own failings of intellect and character, with generous support from the doctrine of original sin." It gets better from there. Ayer's presentation and paper remain vivid in my memory for their conciseness, clarity, and lively style. For a new law professor trying to learn his craft, Ayer provided a great example. Anyone who believes that legal scholarship needs to be dry and boring should read Ayer's work.

I'm sure we'll be treated to more of the same over the coming days. For a preview, check out Ayer's eclectic and always entertaining blog, Underbelly: A Journal of Soft Information.

Holiday Leftovers

It's winter break at our respective universities, and I'm guessing that the blogging will be on the light side for the rest of this week. Next week, things should pick up again. On January 2, Jack Ayer, a law professor at UC-Davis, will be joining us as a guest blogger. Check out Jack's own blog, Underbelly, for all the soft information you'll ever need. Also, the annual meeting for the Association of American Law Schools begins on January 3. I'll try to make a few posts about things about what I hear that might be of interest to Credit Slips readers.

We hope all of our readers are having a great holiday season. One of the things that 2006 brought was the introduction of the Credit Slips blog, and it's been a lot of fun. Thank you to those of you who have been reading and contributing. We'll do our best to keep improving this site.

Thank You to Kathleen Engel & Pat McCoy

Thanks to Professors Kathleen Engel and Pat McCoy for guest blogging last week. They added new perspectives on the important issues surrounding residential mortgage financing and offered provocative ideas about how to improve its legal regulation. Their post on the ability of subprime borrowers to shop for better loan terms generated one of the more extended discussions we have had on this blog. You can find more of their work at the SSRN authors' pages for Professor Engel and for Professor McCoy.

We will continue to have guest bloggers from time to time. We hope our readers find that the guest bloggers provide new perspectives and explore different issues than we have offered. Look for several guest bloggers in January.

Welcome to Guest Bloggers McCoy & Engel

Credit Slips is delighted to welcome Professor Patricia McCoy and Professor Kathleen Engel as guest bloggers for the week of December 10-16. We appreciate their willingness to share their expertise on mortgage lending and housing law with Credit Slips readers.

Patricia McCoy is the George J. and Helen M. England Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut. Prior to becoming a professor, she was a partner at Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw in Washington D.C., where she specialized in complex securities, banking and commercial litigation. From 2002 to 2004, McCoy served on the Consumer Advisory Council of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, where she chaired the Council's Consumer Credit Committee.

Kathleen Engel is an Associate Professor at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law. She was formerly an associate at Burnham & Hines in Boston, where she litigated civil rights and housing discrimination cases. Engel has spoken several times at Federal Reserve Bank conferences and in other fora on housing and lending laws.

McCoy and Engel are frequent co-authors on predatory lending and mortgage markets. Their scholarship examines the law and economics of these topics, focusing on the intersection of market failures and consumer protection concerns. Their work has attracted the attention of policymakers and should be on your Christmas vacation reading list if you aren't familiar with it. Their most recent work focuses on Wall Street's role in financing predatory lending.

Where's Our Cut?

The Credit Slips contributors have an understanding of the Internet that falls somewhere between Sen. Ted Stevens analogy to a series of tubes and Al Gore's supposedly claiming to having invented it. For example, we were amazed the first time we typed in "creditslips.org," and the tubes actually took us to our web site. Another time, we had thought maybe we should get the rights to "creditslips.com" and other related names, but then decided that would require time, effort, and money. We don't like to expend time, effort, and money. Besides, we should be so lucky that someone would care enough to cybersquat on our name.

In a comment to a post yesterday, Credit Slips reader Dave noted, "Ironically, when you Google 'credit slips' there is usually at least one sidebar ad for a credit card." Could that be right? I had to try this myself. Sure enough, I got ads for "Easy Bad Credit Loans" and "Get a Credit Card Now" as well as several solicitations assuming I was a merchant and offering to sell me equipment for credit card imprinters. How did the tubes know?

Regular readers of this blog but especially my friends and family will not be surprised to learn that I find this commercialization of our work appalling. It is occurring entirely without any compensation to us and by "us," I mean "me."

Comments Are Open--Go Wild

Comments now will appear immediately once they are posted (although blog authors may decide not to allow comments for individual blog postings). Under the old system, I had to approve each comment before it appeared on the blog site. As much fun as it was to monitor the blog continually and watch for new comments, it was getting a little old. We started out by moderating the comments ex ante because we were new to the blogging thing and feared oodles of spam. That problem never materialized.

We did not have a single problem with any comment that has been submitted. We'll still remove any comments that are inappropriate (e.g., profanity, spam, ad hominem attacks, or flame wars), but we don't see any reason that would suddenly start. So, go wild. Well, don't go that wild.

Ronald Mann: Guest Blogger

Credit Slips welcomes Professor Ronald Mann as our inaugural guest blogger. He is the Ben H. & Kitty King Powell Chair in Business and Commercial Law and the Co-Director of the Center for Law, Business, and Economics at the University of Texas School of Law and an expert on credit card law and policy. While one of his more impressive achievements is arguably the distillation of his myriad accomplishments into a concise CV, I'll be an obedient blogger and focus instead on the reason that I think his work is really important.  In a decade of scholarly research, Ronald has masterfully blended public and private law concerns to show how something as arcane and ominous sounding as a "payment system" shapes how consumers spend and borrow, and how these choices affect society. He marshals credible empirical data for his analyses and presents his findings in a balanced and measured way. Translation: he has thought long and hard about what's good and what's bad about credit cards and other payment devices, and he will make you think long and hard about the same. If you find his postings intriguing, read his just-released book Charging Ahead: The Growth and Regulation of Payment Card Markets Around the World. It's accessible but sophisticated, and I commend it to Credit Slips readers.