By Vincent S. J. Buccola (University of Pennsylvania – The Wharton School – Legal Studies & Business Ethics Department).
In Czyzewski v. Jevic Holding Corporation, 137 S. Ct. 973 (2017), the Supreme Court held that bankruptcy courts lack authority to implement structured dismissals that sidestep the absolute priority rule. The bankruptcy judge’s power to resolve cases by dismissal, a power the Bankruptcy Code grants explicitly, is implicitly limited by the norm of waterfall distribution—or so in any case the majority reasoned. The Court’s decision rested on an interpretive default rule. Because distributional priorities are so important to bankruptcy, the Code will be understood to bar departures absent a clear statement. At the same time, however, the Jevic majority went out of its way to distinguish (and seemingly bless) what it called “interim distributions” such as critical vendor orders, notwithstanding their capacity to undermine priorities and their dubious textual basis.
This article argues that this seeming inconsistency in Jevic is no misstep, but that there might be some sense to the conflicting interpretive approaches after all. Two distinctive paradigms now color interpretation of the Bankruptcy Code. One paradigm governs during the early stages of a case and is oriented toward the importance of debtor and judicial discretion to use estate assets for the general welfare. The other paradigm governs a bankruptcy’s conclusion and is oriented toward the sanctity of creditors’ bargained-for distributional entitlements. In combination, they produce what appears to be policy incoherence. But, at least in a world of robust senior creditor influence, a rule under which judicial discretion diminishes over the course of a case—discretion giving way to entitlements—may in fact tend to maximize creditor recoveries.
The full article is available here.