Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code is organized around the absolute priority rule. This rule mandates the rank-ordering of claims. If one creditor has priority over another, this creditor must be paid ...in full before the junior creditor receives anything. Many have suggested various modifications to the absolute priority rule. The reasons vary and range from ensuring proper incentives to protecting nonadjusting creditors. The rule itself, however, remains the common starting place. This Article uses relative priority, an entirely different priority system that flourished until the late 1930s, to show that using absolute priority even as a point of departure is suspect. Much of the complexity and virtually all of the stress points of modern Chapter 11 arise from the uneasy fit between its starting place (absolute instead of relative priority) and its procedure (negotiation in the shadow of a judicial valuation instead of a market sale). These forces are leading to the emergence of a hybrid system of priority that may be more efficient than one centered around absolute priority.
Well into the twentieth century, a justice on the Supreme Court was a common law judge. Before the rise of the regulatory state and 'Erie Railroad Co v Tompkins's' rejection of general federal common ...law, a master of the warp and woof of the common law such as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr was securely in his element. The modern federal judge, by contrast, is a master of federal statutes and regulations. But the common law still matters as it remains the foundation on which federal statutes are written.
Unlikely Resurrection Baird, Douglas G.
The University of Chicago law review,
08/2019, Letnik:
86, Številka:
S1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Many of Richard Posner's opinions boldly confront great questions. But equally important are those that, in the aggregate, illuminate discrete areas of the law and make them easier to understand. ...Among the best examples are Posner's some two dozen opinions on promissory estoppel. They illustrate his ability to reshape the terms of even the most familiar debates.
Bankruptcy's Quiet Revolution Baird, Douglas G
The American bankruptcy law journal,
09/2017, Letnik:
91, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Over the last few years, reorganization practice has undergone a massive change. A new device-the restructuring support agreement-has transformed chapter 11 negotiations. This puts reorganization law ...at a crossroads. Chapter 1 l's commitment to a nonmarket restructuring with a rigid priority system requires bankruptcy judges to police bargaining in bankruptcy, but the Bankruptcy Code gives them relatively little explicit guidance about how they should adjust when a new practice alters the bargaining environment. This Essay shows that long-established principles of bankruptcy should lead judges to focus not on how these agreements affect what each party receives, but rather on how they can interfere with the flow of information needed to apply chapter 1 l's substantive rules.
Making Sense of Make-Wholes Baird, Douglas G
The American bankruptcy law journal,
12/2020, Letnik:
94, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Appellate courts will soon need to decide whether such a loss is either a claim for "unmatured interest" within the meaning of 11 U.S.C. 502(b) that is not allowable or an ordinary, prepetition claim ...that is.2 This essay attempts to provide some perspective on this question.3 This essay begins by identifying the legal attributes of make-whole clauses and then discussing the various legal issues that make-whole provi' sions have raised in bankruptcy apart from the question of whether they should be disallowed under 11 U.S.C. 502(b). The borrower might have ready access to credit markets six months before maturity, and it may want to guard against the risk that the economy will turn and this access will disappear.6 As a practical matter, such clauses merely give the borrower a range of choices over how to repay the loan and are generally enforceable regardless of the form that they take.7 The picture is quite different when it comes to the ability of the lender to terminate the loan. When interest rates are relatively stable, as they largely were before the mid-1970s, damages over and above principal, out-of-pocket costs, and accrued interest are likely to be small to nonexistent. ...turning away the chance to recover more may also reassure borrowers who fear that the lender will be too quick to pull the trigger in the wake of default. If the debtor is in effect choosing to end the relationship, then the court can use its equitable powers to order the borrower to pay the makewhole premium.10 B. Make-Whole Clauses in Bankruptcy It is against this backdrop that bankruptcy courts confront make-whole clauses.
Palegawra cave, alongside its neighbouring Zarzi, has been an emblematic site of the Epipalaeolithic (Zarzian) cultural horizon in the NW Zagros of Southwest Asia ever since its first exploration in ...1951 by Bruce Howe and Robert Braidwood in the context of the Iraq-Jarmo project. At the time scientific excavation, sampling and analysis methods were either under-developed or did not exist. In this paper we present the first results of new excavations at Palegawra conducted in 2016-2017 by the Eastern Fertile Crescent (EFEC) project, a research collaboration of the University of Liverpool and the Sulaymaniyah Directorate of Antiquities and Heritage. Our research has produced the first radiometric evidence pushing back the chronology of the NW Zagros Epipalaeolithic to the Last Glacial Maximum, thus fully aligning it with Epipalaeolithic facies until now known only from the Levant and the south Anatolian coast. We have also unearthed, for the first time in the Palaeolithic of the Zagros, direct archaeobotanical evidence for hitherto elusive Zarzian plant exploitation and the vegetation of the NW Zagros piedmont zone from the LGM to the end of the Lateglacial (~19,600-13,000 cal BP). The new Palegawra chronology alongside our detailed studies of its material culture and faunal and botanical assemblages suggest that the prevailing Epipalaeolithic habitation pattern in the NW Zagros (centred on generalised persistent occupations of small caves and rock-shelters alongside task-oriented ephemeral open-air campsites) remained an enduring characteristic of the Zarzian horizon throughout this period. The Palegawra data clearly show that neither resource levels and climate conditions nor geographic and/or cultural isolation provide adequate explanations for the stability and longevity of Zarzian lifeways during this long timespan. More fieldwork is required, including the discovery, excavation and intensive sampling of other Zarzian sites, for reaching a data-informed understanding of the nature and evolution of the NW Zagros Epipalaeolithic.
Agricultural origins on the Anatolian plateau Baird, Douglas; Fairbairn, Andrew; Jenkins, Emma ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
04/2018, Letnik:
115, Številka:
14
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This paper explores the explanations for, and consequences of, the early appearance of food production outside the Fertile Crescent of Southwest Asia, where it originated in the 10th/9th millennia ...cal BC. We present evidence that cultivation appeared in Central Anatolia through adoption by indigenous foragers in the mid ninth millennium cal BC, but also demonstrate that uptake was not uniform, and that some communities chose to actively disregard cultivation. Adoption of cultivation was accompanied by experimentation with sheep/goat herding in a system of low-level food production that was integrated into foraging practices rather than used to replace them. Furthermore, rather than being a short-lived transitional state, low-level food production formed part of a subsistence strategy that lasted for several centuries, although its adoption had significant long-term social consequences for the adopting community at Boncuklu. Material continuities suggest that Boncuklu’s community was ancestral to that seen at the much larger settlement of Çatalhöyük East from 7100 cal BC, by which time a modest involvement with food production had been transformed into a major commitment to mixed farming, allowing the sustenance of a very large sedentary community. This evidence from Central Anatolia illustrates that polarized positions explaining the early spread of farming, opposing indigenous adoption to farmer colonization, are unsuited to understanding local sequences of subsistence and related social change. We go beyond identifying the mechanisms for the spread of farming by investigating the shorter- and longer-term implications of rejecting or adopting farming practices.
Weakly coupled electron spin pairs that experience weak spin-orbit interaction can control electronic transitions in molecular and solid-state systems. Known to determine radical pair reactions, they ...have been invoked to explain phenomena ranging from avian magnetoreception to spin-dependent charge-carrier recombination and transport. Spin pairs exhibit persistent spin coherence, allowing minute magnetic fields to perturb spin precession and thus recombination rates and photoreaction yields, giving rise to a range of magneto-optoelectronic effects in devices. Little is known, however, about interparticle magnetic interactions within such pairs. Here we present pulsed electrically detected electron spin resonance experiments on poly(styrene-sulfonate)-doped poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) (
PSS) devices, which show how interparticle spin-spin interactions (magnetic-dipolar and spin-exchange) between charge-carrier spin pairs can be probed through the detuning of spin-Rabi oscillations. The deviation from uncoupled precession frequencies quantifies both the exchange (<30 neV) and dipolar (23.5±1.5 neV) interaction energies responsible for the pair's zero-field splitting, implying quantum mechanical entanglement of charge-carrier spins over distances of 2.1±0.1 nm.
Anatolia was home to some of the earliest farming communities. It has been long debated whether a migration of farming groups introduced agriculture to central Anatolia. Here, we report the first ...genome-wide data from a 15,000-year-old Anatolian hunter-gatherer and from seven Anatolian and Levantine early farmers. We find high genetic continuity (~80-90%) between the hunter-gatherers and early farmers of Anatolia and detect two distinct incoming ancestries: an early Iranian/Caucasus related one and a later one linked to the ancient Levant. Finally, we observe a genetic link between southern Europe and the Near East predating 15,000 years ago. Our results suggest a limited role of human migration in the emergence of agriculture in central Anatolia.
PDF
