The Bankruptcy Firm

Abstract

This short response, prepared for the University of Pennsylvania Law Review’s symposium on Bankruptcy’s New Frontiers, takes stock of the contributions of Baird, Casey & Picker, The Bankruptcy Partition, 166 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1675 (2018), and criticizes indeterminacy in the scope of the article’s central construct. Coase’s approach to the theory of the firm would provide a useful supplemental framework, I argue. Questions about the scope of bankruptcy jurisdiction — about the kinds of investor disputes a bankruptcy process should seek to resolve — raise the same tradeoff between opportunism and information costs that Coase and scholars following in his tradition identified long ago. Although optimal scope is unknowable in any given case, the firm investors have created in fact is, I suggest, a useful starting place.

Keywords: bankruptcy, chapter 11, bankruptcy partition, bankruptcy estate, bankruptcy jurisdiction, asset partitioning