Bankruptcy Without Borders

Abstract

Review Essay on Terrence Halliday and Bruce Carruthers, Bankrupt: Global Lawmaking and Systemic Financial Crisis.

In 1998, Bruce Carruthers and Terence Halliday published a magisterial 600-page tome on the reform of bankruptcy law in the United States (1978) and Britain (1985). Rescuing Business was really two books in one. It detailed how institutional differences, and power differentials among interested players, translated a shared concern about corporate bankruptcy into quite different policy changes in the two countries. The shared concern was that bankruptcy conventions were not Pareto optimal.