David Skeel is a professor of corporate law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a leading authority on bankruptcy law. He contributed to The Weekly Standard between 2009 and 2014, writing frequently about bankruptcy policy, financial regulation, and the role of bankruptcy as an alternative to government bailouts. He is the author of several books, including 'Debt's Dominion: A History of Bankruptcy Law in America.'
The life of a young college graduate isn’t what it used to be, as viewers of Girls and other recent hits well know. In 1970, the median age of marriage was 21 for women and 23 for men, not much different than in 1950. By 2000, the averages were 25 and 27, and they have continued to climb. Gone are…
From the moment Detroit filed for bankruptcy last summer, comparisons to the 2009 Chrysler and General Motors bailouts have abounded. Most highlight the differences, noting that the federal government is unlikely to pump billions of dollars into Detroit. But although the differences are real, the…
Although Detroit’s bankruptcy is only a few days old, it already has become clear that it could bring answers to two very important questions: whether municipal bankruptcy law is a plausible alternative to either bailouts or decades of fiscal malaise for large cities that are sagging under…
Anyone who proposed even a decade ago that a state should be permitted to file for bankruptcy would have been dismissed as crazy. But times have changed. As Arnold Schwarze-negger’s plea for $7 billion of federal assistance for California earlier this year made clear, the states are the next…
The conventional wisdom about the bailouts of 2008 goes something like this. Federal regulators started off on the right foot by bailing out Bear Stearns and midwifing its sale to JPMorgan Chase. They were right to bail out AIG six months later, but botched the execution. And Lehman Brothers, the…