An impassioned plea for confining bankruptcy to its core purpose of resolving just debts justly.
An exposé of the racial, class, and corporate biases in the U.S. bankruptcy system.
In her first book, Jacoby, a professor of law at the University of North Carolina, argues that bankruptcy has “fallen short” as a legal tool to provide debt relief for struggling individuals and families. Instead, it “entrenches existing hierarchies and power structures.” Under the federal Bankruptcy Code, individual bankruptcy places onerous demands on filers and tramples on their privacy, with Black filers suffering additional discrimination. The bankruptcy courts are more accommodating to businesses, which the author labels “fake people.” Businesses are able to retain their autonomy, and all debts, unlike for individuals, qualify for cancellation. In municipal bankruptcy filings (such as Detroit recently undertook), the courts favor financial claimants over public services. What most angers Jacoby are organizations such as Purdue Pharma or the Boy Scouts of America, which use the system to resolve civil liabilities resulting from the harm—e.g., opioid addiction, sexual abuse—that they have caused. Many of these filings occur when the organization is not seriously indebted. Such cases deny claimants a voice in the resolution, block them from pursuing civil cases, and grant minimal payments or none at all—“a promise to pay is not money.” Although the legal and administrative detail is at times daunting, Jacoby offers a convincing and mostly accessible assessment of how an ostensibly just system can be manipulated to be decidedly unjust. As for reform, she offers only general recommendations such as prohibiting the use of bankruptcy for litigation management and increasing transparency in corporate and municipal filings. Given the prevalence of personal and business bankruptcies and the ripple effects they induce (job loss, family disruption), this book is deserving of wide readership.
An impassioned plea for confining bankruptcy to its core purpose of resolving just debts justly.Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9781620977866
Page Count: 320
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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