The 'fresh start' that is afforded individual debtors through the discharge doctrines of American bankruptcy law has, to date, defied justification by a single normative principle or theoretical paradigm. The justificatory accounts that have been advanced either fail to explain core doctrines that have long defined the right of discharge or invite theoretical challenges that suggest that their descriptive virtues are swamped by their normative or conceptual shortcomings.

This book presents a taxonomy of traditional justifications of bankruptcy and subjects them to critical evaluation. It...

A Debtor World contains a collection of contributions about the societal implications of private debt. The essays comprising this volume are authored by dozens of leading U.S. and international academics who have written about debt or issues related to debt in a wide range of disciplines including law, sociology, psychology, history, economics, and more.

The goal of this collection is to explore debt neither as a problem nor a solution but as a phenomenon and to promote the exchange of knowledge to better comprehend why consumers...