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It Takes A Village: Detroit, Chapter 9, and Litigotiation

posted by Melissa Jacoby

HumanspokesFirst, the most recent news: the fee examiner job in Detroit's chapter 9 has just been awarded. And the Detroit Free Press has just awarded itself a not-so-subtly snarky news headline

Similar to the bankruptcy court's order appointing a mediator, the fee examiner order authorizes the examiner to call in reinforcements - other lawyers at his law firm, as well as an accountant and the accountant's firm. Judicial Team Chapter 9 Detroit grows. 

A cadre of federal judges once fought hard - repeatedly and successfully - to exclude bankruptcy judges from the Article III judiciary. In so doing, they conceptualized bankruptcy judges as the helpers, not the ones building teams. When a district judge was asked at a Congressional hearing in the 1970s whether bankruptcy judges would need law clerks, the district judge's NO could be heard from miles around. That issue has long been resolved - of course, they need law clerks. The Federal Rules of Bankruptcy Procedure prohibit special masters in bankruptcy cases. But bankruptcy courts commonly appoint fee examiners or fee committees in bigger cases, which seem little different from a special master. And the judges fighting against Article III status never imagined a bankruptcy judge appointing his own chief district judge as the omnibus mediator, with the potential for a raft of additional judicial and non-judicial mediators in tow. But now it has happened. And that delegation of responsibility from bankruptcy judge to district judge is already underway, per the first mediation order dated August 16.  

And yet, the building of this team should feel familiar to those Article III judges from the 1970s and 1980s. When they needed to bring order to complex cases involving unconstitutional conditions in prisons and schools, and bargaining over the remedial scheme, district judges brought in more people. Masters. Special masters. Hearing officers. Monitors. Various kinds of committees. Ombudsmen. Barring the appointment of lions, tigers, or bears, the City of Detroit case yet again illustrates commonalities between the non-adversarial aspects of bankruptcy cases and non-bankruptcy litigotiation.

Human spokes image courtesy of Shutterstock

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