Elizabeth Warren

Jay Lawrence Westbrook

Katherine Porter

John Pottow

One of the leading casebooks in the field, The Law of Debtors and Creditors features 39 problem sets with realistic questions a lawyer considers in managing a bankruptcy case. It also challenges the students with the major policy and theoretical questions in the field. The text features a functional organization as a bankruptcy case would unfold. The focus is on teaching through the realistic problems, complete with ethical difficulties embedded into the fact patterns. The presentation is lively and colloquial. Explanatory text throughout makes bankruptcy law accessible to students and easier to teach. Because it divides the subject between consumer and business bankruptcy, professors can select the depth of coverage for each subject in designing a two-, three-, or four-credit class. The authors—Senator Elizabeth Warren, Congresswoman Katie Porter, and Professors Pottow (Michigan) and Westbrook (Texas)—are among the most prominent in the field. Uniquely comprehensive Teacher’s Manual—chock full of material on how to design class around the problem sets, citations to new cases and literature, and suggestions for steering class discussion. New to the Eighth Edition: The emergence of a whole new form of chapter 11 bankruptcy, the Small Business Reorganization Act in subchapter V, just as the Covid19 crisis exploded The impact of recent Supreme Court decisions, including Jevic, Merit Management, Midland Funding, and Wellness New cases and issues since the Seventh Edition Updated materials on § 363 sales Incorporation of discussion of ABI Commission on Consumer Bankruptcy Reform A number of interesting new problems Professors and students will benefit from: Separation of consumer bankruptcy from business bankruptcy—professors can select the depth of coverage for each subject Lively explanatory text—makes bankruptcy law accessible to students and easier to teach Engagement of current events and economic trends Discussion of many recent cases 39 problem sets—featuring the realistic questions a lawyer considers in applying the statutory provisions in a bankruptcy case Substantial discussion of the ethical questions that arise in bankruptcy practice, and including ethical issues in the problems students must solve Functional organization—as a bankruptcy case would unfold rather than using some artificial paradigm Chapters specifically devoted to bankruptcy theory (consumer and business), to international insolvencies, and to important ethics issue in the consumer and business contexts Problem sets designed to combine doctrinal, transactional, and theoretical issues

Text, Cases, and Problems

The Law of Debtors and Creditors

Modern Consumer Law is a lively, concise, problem-focused text on contemporary consumer law. It is the only text on the market conceptualized after Dodd-Frank and its creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The book takes a functional approach to consumer law, looking at types of transactions such as mortgages as well as kinds of laws such as disclosure rules. It examines core theoretical questions in an accessible way, revealing consumer law as a series of statutes built on the common law foundations of contract and tort. Organized into 28 class-sized assignments, the book is easy to adapt to a teacher’s preferences in terms of focus and class credits. The problems provide students with the opportunity to apply statutes to realistic situations and ask them to consider the perspectives of consumers, businesses, and lawmakers. Katherine Porter is a national expert in consumer law and a co-author of Wolter Kluwer’s The Law of Debtors and Creditors.

Modern Consumer Law

About 1.5 million households filed bankruptcy in the last year, making bankruptcy as common as college graduation and divorce. The recession has pushed more and more families into financial collapse—with unemployment, declines in retirement wealth, and falling house values destabilizing the American middle class. Broke explores the consequences of this unprecedented growth in consumer debt and shows how excessive borrowing undermines the prosperity of middle class America. While the recession that began in mid-2007 has widened the scope of the financial pain caused by overindebtedness, the problem predated that large-scale economic meltdown. And by all indicators, consumer debt will be a defining feature of middle-class families for years to come. The staples of middle-class life—going to college, buying a house, starting a small business—carry with them more financial risk than ever before, requiring more borrowing and new riskier forms of borrowing. This book reveals the people behind the statistics, looking closely at how people get to the point of serious financial distress, the hardships of dealing with overwhelming debt, and the difficulty of righting one's financial life. In telling the stories of financial failures, this book exposes an all-too-real part of middle-class life that is often lost in the success stories that dominate the American economic narrative. Authored by experts in several disciplines, including economics, law, political science, psychology, and sociology, Broke presents analyses from an original, proprietary data set of unprecedented scope and detail, the 2007 Consumer Bankruptcy Project. Topics include class status, home ownership, educational attainment, impacts of self-employment, gender differences, economic security, and the emotional costs of bankruptcy. The book makes judicious use of illustrations to present key findings and concludes with a discussion of the implications of the data for contemporary policy debates.

Katherine Porter

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