What's 43 Years Among Friends?
One of my recent blog posts took issue with the historical claims in a Supreme Court amicus brief filed by several eminent law professors in the Purdue Pharma appeal. One of the professors, Tony Casey at University of Chicago Law School, fired back with a comment, and I responded at length in the comments section, but I think the exchange is worth elevating to a stand-alone blog post.
To recap, the good amici jumped all over my claim that the Framers could not have conceived of nonconsensual nondebtor releases as being within the scope of the Bankruptcy Power. To this end, they cited a couple of English cases from 1618-1620. My original post pointed out that these were not contemporaneously reported decisions; they remained unknown until 1932 when a modern scholar "reported" the cases from his own reassembly of various Chancery documents. Moreover, the decisions were not even bankruptcy decisions, but compositions, not operating under any bankruptcy statute.
Professor Casey responded:
I really don't understand the argument here. First, how can you say releases were "incomprehensible" to the framers given that Lord Bacon was granting them? Even if the opinion is unreported, I just can't see the leap to arguing that no one designing a judicial system could have thought of or comprehended this thing that the Lord Chancellor had done multiple times. Second, the point about these not being "bankruptcy" cases is semantic. These were part of compositions that look just like Chapter 11 cases today. Third, even if you are right about everything else, our main point was about your 1986 claim. You write this [in your blog post], "because there was no reported decision of these cases until 1932, they do not undercut the fact that Anglo-American bankruptcy law had no notion of nonconsenusal nondebtor releases in until 1986." How do you get from 1932 to 1986? Finally, we point out other historical pedigree including cases from the 1940s.
Okay. Let's try this again.