Bankruptcy Automatic Stay.

Byline: Derek Hawkins

United States Supreme Court

Case Name: Ritzen Group, Inc. v. Jackson Masonry, LLC

Case No.: 18-938

Focus: Bankruptcy Automatic Stay

Under the Bankruptcy Code, filing a petition for bankruptcy automatically "operates as a stay" of creditors' debt collection efforts outside the umbrella of the bankruptcy case. 11 U. S. C. 362(a). The question this case presents concerns the finality of, and therefore the time allowed for appeal from, a bankruptcy court's order denying a creditor's request for relief from the automatic stay. In civil litigation generally, a court's decision ordinarily becomes "final," for purposes of appeal, only upon completion of the entire case, i.e., when the decision "terminate[s the] action" or "ends the litigation on the merits and leaves nothing for the court to do but execute the judgment." Gelboim v. Bank of America Corp., 574 U. S. 405, 409 (2015) (internal quotation marks omitted). The regime in bankruptcy is different. A bankruptcy case embraces "an aggregation of individual controversies." Collier on Bankruptcy 5.08[1][b], p. 543 (16th ed. 2019). Orders in bankruptcy cases qualify as "final" when they definitively dispose of discrete disputes within the overarching bankruptcy case. Bullard v. Blue Hills Bank, 575 U. S. 496, 501...