3CL Seminar: 'Equity in Distress: Justice and Fairness in Business Rescue'

Speaker: Professor Edward Janger, the David M. Barse Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School, USA

Abstract: The goal of the book is to flesh out concepts of equity and fairness that are embedded (but often overlooked) in the law of corporate governance and the Bankruptcy Code.  The main themes of the book have been developed in prior work of mine and with others.

The concept of "equity" in financial distress is developed in Jacoby and Janger, "Tracing Equity," 96 Tex. L. Rev. 673 (2018), and developed further in "Equitable Duty: Regulating Corporate Transactions in the Vicinity of Insolvency from a Comparative Perspective, in Arthur Laby and Jacob Hale Russell eds. Fiduciary Obligations in Business (CUP 2021).

The competing concerns about process -- coercion and holdouts -- are worked through in Jacoby and Janger, "Ice Cube Bonds: Allocating the Price of Process in Chapter 11 Cases", 123 Yale L.J. 862 (2014), Janger and Levitin, "One Dollar, One Vote: Mark to Market Governance in Bankruptcy, 104 Iowa L. Rev. 1857 (2019), and Janger and Levitin, "Badges of Opportunism: Principles for Policing Restructuring Support Agreements, 13 Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial, and Commercial Law 169 (2018).

Finally, in "The Proceduralist Inversion, 130 Yale L.J. Forum 335 (2020), I seek (with Levitin) to establish the link between process and entitlement in debt adjustment negotiations.

Most recently, in "Equity for Intermediaries: The Resolution of Financial Firms in Bankruptcy and Bank Resolution," 41 Yale J. Reg. 965 (2024), I attempt to pull it all together by developing a concept I call, "constitutive equity."  The interconnections between these essays and articles, are, I suspect, apparent only to me.  My goal, in the book, is to link the themes in a concise and readable fashion.  As you will see, I have a ways to go in that regard.

Professor Edward Janger is the David M. Barse Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School. 

He teaches and writes in the areas of bankruptcy law, commercial law, consumer credit and data privacy. His articles have appeared in the Illinois Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the Texas Law Review and the Yale Law Journal.  Recent scholarship explores issues of value allocation and governance in Chapter 11 cases, cross-border bankruptcy, resolution of systemically important financial institutions, and the treatment of financial contracts in bankruptcy. He is co-director of the Center for the Study of Business Law & Regulation at Brooklyn Law School.

3CL runs the 3CL Sullivan & Cromwell Lunchtime Seminar Series, featuring leading academics from the Faculty, and high-profile practitioners.

All seminars take place in B16 in person from 1pm to 2pm if not indicated otherwise. A sandwich lunch is available for all participants from 12:30pm just outside of B16.

Enquiries to: 3cl@law.cam.ac.uk