As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in America - Hardcover

Sullivan, Teresa A.; Warren, Elizabeth; Westbrook, Jay Lawrence

3.27

11 ratings by Goodreads

9780195055788: As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in America

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195055780 ISBN 13: 9780195055788

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1989

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Bankruptcy in America is a booming business. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans each year have joined giant corporations, like Johns Manville and Continental Airlines, and once-wealthy individuals, like John Connally, in filing for bankruptcy. Is this dramatic growth a result of mushrooming debt--consumer debt and consumer bankruptcy have both more than doubled since the late 1970s--or does it reflect a moreal decline that permits the middle class to evade their debts? As We Forgive Our Debtors addresses these questions with the data gathered in the largest empirical study of consumer bankruptcy ever done in this country. The authors of this mulit-disciplinary study describe the law and the statistics in clear, nontechnical language, combining a thorough statistical description of the social and economic position of consumer bankrupts with human portraits of the debtors and creditors whose journey has ended in bankruptcy court.
In addition to an overall picture of bankruptcy, As We Forgive Our Debtors devotes several chapters to hidden subgroups in bankruptcy. One focuses on women, analyzing the desperate financial circumstances of single women and the increasing pressure on one-income families. Another reveals that more than half of the bankrupts are homeowners and discusses the anomalies in the way they are treated by current law. Other chapters examine the surprising role of medical debts in financial collapse and give a new account of the financial pressures on small businesses. The book also provides the first detailed analysis ever done of the position of various types of creditors whose debtors go bankrupt. This book is destined to become a standard reference for sociologists who study wealth and income and for every credit manager in America. It will also bring to the legal and political debates about bankruptcy law hard facts that will help legal scholars in many fields to measure the distance between armchair theorizing and the law in action.

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From the Publisher:

With the sharp increase in bankruptcies over the past decade and an increasingly wide cross-section of occupational distribution represented, the question treated by this study is both a legal and a sociological one. It does not attempt to study the internal workings of bankruptcy, but the authors look outward to the larger population of bankrupt debtors. Using a multi-disciplinary approach, the authors have drawn social and economic portraits of typical debtors against the backdrop of the law and with hard empirical data.

About the Author:

About the Authors:
Teresa A. Sullivan is Professor of Sociology and Law at the University of Texas.
Elizabeth Warren is William A. Schnader Professor of Commercial Law at the University of Pennsylvania.
Jay Lawrence Westbrook is Andrews & Kurth Professor of Law at the University of Texas.

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