The voting rules in Chapter 11 are supposed to ensure that debtor firms are appropriately liquidated or reorganized. However, these convoluted and internally inconsistent rules are poorly designed to produce such outcomes, and there is no evidence that they do. However, the major proposals for...

The housing crisis threatens to destroy hundreds of billions of dollars of value by causing homeowners with negative equity to walk away from their houses. We advocate a legal reform that would allow homeowners to reduce principal while giving mortgage holders an equity interest. Such a plan...