Bankruptcy Law and the Post-Scalia Supreme Court
Justice Antonin Scalia’s death is big news in the larger political world, leaving a Supreme Court that may be evenly split on a wide range of politically and socially charged legal questions, writes G. Ray Warner in Greenberg Traurig’s GT Restucturing Review.
“Although one can view many bankruptcy law questions through a political or social policy lens, the Justices rarely see the cases they take in that way. Instead, they treat most of their bankruptcy appeals as technical questions of statutory interpretation,” the article says.
“Justice Scalia was very hostile to the idea of equitable powers and his opinion in Law v. Siegel threatened the very idea of bankruptcy courts as courts of equity. His departure leaves that side of the debate without a strong advocate and likely shifts the balance back towards more robust equitable powers in bankruptcy,” Warner writes.
