- Collection:
- Georgia Law Review
- Title:
- Portraits of Bankruptcy Filers
- Creator:
- Foohey, Pamela
Lawless, Robert M.
Thorne, Deborah - Date of Original:
- 2022-01-01
- Subject:
- University of Georgia. School of Law
Law--Study and teaching
Georgia Law Review Association - Location:
- United States, Georgia, Clarke County, Athens, 33.96095, -83.37794
- Medium:
- articles
- Type:
- Text
- Format:
- application/pdf
- Description:
- One in ten adult Americans has turned to the consumer bankruptcy system for help. For almost forty years, the only systematic data collection about the people who file bankruptcy has come from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project (CBP), for which we serve as co-principal investigators. In this Article, we use CBP data from 2013 to 2019 to describe who is using the bankruptcy system, providing the first comprehensive overview of bankruptcy filers in thirty years. We use principal component analysis to leverage these data to identify distinct groups of people who file bankruptcy. This technique allows us to situate the distinctions among filers’ financial and household situations within what bankruptcy laws and courts can and cannot provide. We critique the consumer bankruptcy system, based on the totality of people who have used it recently, to identify avenues for reforming bankruptcy and to underscore the broader economic, racial, and social issues that consumer bankruptcy filings highlight.
Consumer Bankruptcy Project -- bankruptcy -- financial data -- household data -- statistics -- Bankruptcy Law -- Law -- Law and Race -- Law and Society - External Identifiers:
- Metadata URL:
- https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/glr/vol56/iss2/3
- Holding Institution:
- Alexander Campbell King Law Library
- Rights:
-
