Rethinking the Role of the Law of Corporate Distress in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

Thomas Jackson famously described the role of all bankruptcy law as reducing the incentive for individual enforcement against the assets of a distressed company. Although scholars have debated other aspects of Jackson’s thesis, most have continued to identify with this as the central tenet of bankruptcy law. This paper proposes a new taxonomy: the law of corporate distress comprised of insolvency law and restructuring law. It argues that Thomas Jackson’s description remains apt for part of that taxonomy but draws a distinction between the constituent parts. It reframes the unifying aim of the law of corporate distress as the facilitation of the reallocation of resource in the economy to best use and draws a distinction between insolvency law’s role in reducing the incentive for individual enforcement and restructuring law’s role in providing a deadlock resolution procedure. Adopting a comparative Anglo-American approach it examines the implications of this distinction for insolvency law and restructuring law in the twenty-first century.