Acceptance Remarks
| Publication year | 2014 |
Acceptance Remarks
David G. Epstein
I am grateful to the Emory Bankruptcy Developments Journal for the award and this opportunity to see old friends. And, like myself, a lot of my friends are old.
One of the benefits of being the sixteenth person so honored is that the remarks of earlier recipients published in the Emory Bankruptcy Developments Journal are there to learn from. I did my due diligence. I read all of the published remarks of past honorees . . . in a single weekend.
Kind of like watching House of Cards.1 On reflection, reading the published remarks was nothing like watching House of Cards. No sex, no violence—instead, most of the published remarks included the Lifetime Achievement Award winners' suggestions about how bankruptcy law should be reformed.
That presented a real dilemma.
Obviously, I knew what the editors of the Emory Bankruptcy Developments Journal wanted. They wanted me to come up with a law reform proposal appropriate for publication in the Emory Bankruptcy Developments Journal.
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On the other hand, what Rich Freer2 and other friends in the audience wanted was equally obvious to me. They had a much greater interest in getting home in time to watch The Americans than in remaining at this dinner to hear how I would reform bankruptcy law.
For months, I wrestled with this challenge of how to be true to my obligations to both the Journal editors and to my friends in the audience. I wrote a speech advocating that consumer bankruptcy should basically be an administrative process3 and then tried writing a speech advocating that bankruptcy judges be required to hire term clerks instead of career clerks.4 In time, I realized that the only effect of a speech on either of those topics would be that judges would never appoint me as a claims representative again.
Then, I had an epiphany. And yes, Jews can have epiphanies—at least Jews who have taught at a Methodist school.5
Each year, I get two students who do not yet have a job to work with me on a law review article. The students get co-author credit for the article. That seems to have been helpful to the students in getting a job.
As luck would have it, in March, I finished this year's article, and it is a bankruptcy article.6 The article focuses on the special treatment bankruptcy law affords to prepetition claims of vendors, landlords, and licensors. It
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criticizes the administrative expense priority status of such prepetition claims. Administrative expense priority status should be limited to payment obligations that arise postpetition. A basic bankruptcy policy is that bankruptcy affects a cleavage, separating prepetition claims from postpetition claims.7
While that topic might seem boring, the article has a great title: Not Just Anna Nicole Smith: Cleavage in Bankruptcy. Notwithstanding the...
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