Arbitration in Bankruptcy -- Discharge, the Easy Case
Now that the major work of the ABI Commission on Consumer Bankruptcy is done, I seem to have this thing called "time" again. One of the topics that I have been wanting to post about is arbitration in bankruptcy. If I follow through on my intentions, this will be the first of a few posts on arbitration in bankruptcy.
Arbitration has come to the bankruptcy courts. In the coming years, how the Federal Arbitration Act intersects with the Bankruptcy Code will become an increasingly prominent issue. What I want to talk about in this post is arbitration of a violation of the discharge injunction itself. In the typical factual set-up, a debtor alleges a violation of the discharge injunction, and the creditor moves to send the question to an arbitrator under a predispute arbitration clause, almost always embedded in a form contract. Given the ubiquity of these form contracts in consumer transactions, the only thing at stake is the effectiveness of the consumer bankruptcy system.
We can first exclude one approach to the topic that I occasionally see. It goes something like this. The Supreme Court keeps sending disputes to arbitration and thus has signaled repeatedly it favors arbitration. Therefore, the Court would hold that bankruptcy disputes can be arbitrated. This is not how law works. The Court's tendencies are not "law." One of the Supreme Court justices has famously declared he favors a certain malted beverage, but that hardly makes it the drink of the land (although I also would not be against making it so).
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