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

Bankruptcy in America is a booming business, with hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans filing for bankruptcy each year. Is this dramatic growth a result of mushrooming debt or does it reflect a moral decline that permits the middle class to evade their debts? As We Forgive Our Debtors addresses these questions with hard empirical data drawn from bankruptcy court filings. The authors of this multidisciplinary 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 journeys have ended in bankruptcy court. Book jacket.

Teresa A. Sullivan is Vice President and Graduate Dean, The University of Texas at Austin. Elizabeth Warren is Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law, Harvard University. Jay Lawrence Westbrook is Benno C. Schmidt Chair of Business Law, The University of Texas at Austin.