Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial and Commercial Law Symposium Explores Debt, Social Mobility, and Income Inequality

04/04/2025
Debt in the Real World

The Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial, and Commercial Law hosted its annual symposium on March 27 and 28.  Entitled “Debt in the Real World,” the symposium celebrated the recent completion of five books focused on the concrete effects of debt on the lives of people.  

The five books featured at the event were:  

The symposium consisted of roundtable panel discussions over two days, each inspired by one of the five books. The topics addressed included debt and income inequality, the role of debt in social mobility, the sustainability of the American Dream, and the tradeoff between subsidy and debt with regard to providing for human necessities like food and shelter.  

The symposium was organized by Edward Janger, David M. Barse Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Business Law and Regulation, and Professor Vijay Raghavan, Co-Director of the Edward V. Sparer Public Interest Law Fellowship. 

“There’s a common theme in all of these books, of debt and its effect on real people,” said Janger in his introductory remarks. “And all of these books talk to each other … considering debt and economic mobility, household precarity, income inequality, the health of the middle class, and debt forgiveness as a human right.” 

Within the “Bankruptcy, Fairness, and Due Process” panel on March 27, Melissa B. Jacoby, Graham Kenan Distinguished Professor of Law, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, presented on her book Unjust Debts: How Our Bankruptcy System Makes America More Unequal (New Press, 2024). She spoke of “starting with the broad idea that bankruptcy law is something that intervenes with every other area of law,” of the bankruptcy system’s structural bias in favor of “fake people” (for-profit companies, nonprofit enterprises, and government entities) over “real,” human people, and of how that contributes to race, gender, and class inequality in the United States. Jacoby’s book has been widely lauded for both its scholarship and for its accessibility to lay readers. 

Panelists John A.E. Pottow, the John Philip Dawson Collegiate Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School, discussed the intricacies of the maximalist- and minimalist-system modularities, discretionary power, and the discharge of debt in bankruptcy.  

Janger followed with discussion of the “power tools” employed by large creditors and private equity in bankruptcy proceedings and of procedural fairness and the function and legitimacy of process.  

The “Sustainability and Homeownership” panel was led by A. Mechele Dickerson, Distinguished Teaching Professor and Arthur L. Moller Chair in Bankruptcy Law and Practice, the University of Texas at Austin School of Law. The underlying themes of her book, The Middle-Class New Deal: Restoring Upward Mobility and the American Dream (University of California Press, forthcoming, Jan. 2026), which explore the need for homeownership policy that creates greater opportunity not only for the poor but for the middle class, were discussed by fellow panelists Jacoby and Angela K. Litten, Charles Sapp Chair in Banking, Financial, Commercial and Corporate Law, University of Texas at Austin School of Law.  

Patricia A. McCoy, Liberty Mutual Insurance Professor of Law, Boston College Law, and former first assistant director for mortgage markets for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, led the conversation on her book Sharing Risk: The Path to Economic Well-Being for All  (University of California Press, forthcoming, 2025) for the “Economic Risk and the Social Safety Net” panel.  

At a time, said McCoy, “when roughly half of U.S. households are in economic distress, not earning enough income to cover their basic bills, and with no emergency savings and no retirement savings, it’s important to question the larger ecosystem that produced this.” Among her policy recommendations are greater institutional risk sharing through measures such as healthcare subsidies, increased childcare tax credits, and college debt relief for Pell Grant recipients.  

Panelist Katherine Porter, professor at University of California, Irvine School of Law, and former U.S. Representative, expressed the need for a more adequate measure of well-being than the poverty line, “a common analytical thread that you can use to evaluate, test, measure, and assess these risk-sharing programs.” Programs such as childcare assistance, she said, have considerable and measurable positive long-range outcomes for individuals, families, and the economy. “In more than half the states, childcare costs more per year than in-state college tuition. We should think about childcare as an investment in the economy,” Porter said. 

Adam Levitin, Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law and Finance, Georgetown Law, lauded McCoy’s solutions, while he also expressed the need to “contextualize  the story of the decline of household economic security that starts in the 1970s by understanding how extraordinary the post-war period was from 1945 to 1970, the golden age of security [with its New Deal and Great Society programs], an age that we may never know again.” He emphasized the need to achieve a balance between the expense of risk-sharing programs with the revenue to fund them—and the challenges to government of getting the multitude of elements involved in these programs right.  

In his commentary, Brooklyn Law’s Raghavan discussed redistribution versus risk-sharing when considering social insurance policies, and the current views on each across the political spectrum.  

“Empirical Perspectives on Consumer Debt” featured Deborah Thorne, Professor of Sociology, University of Idaho, presenting on the book Debt’s Grip: Risk and Consumer Bankruptcy (University of California Press, 2025), which she co-authored with Foohey and Robert M. Lawless, Max L. Rowe Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Illinois Program on Law, Behavior, and Social Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign College of Law. Their research sheds light on the battles of individual bankruptcy filers to keep their homes and cars, and afford health care and childcare, among other necessities, and lays bare the consequences of risk privatization. Joining the panel were Professor Susan Block-Lieb, Cooper Family Chair in Urban League Issues, Fordham School of Law and Professor Dalié Jiménez, University of California, Irvine School of Law and director of the Student Loan Law Initiative.   

For the “Debt and Necessities” panel, Chrystin Ondersma, Professor of Law and Judge Morris Stern Scholar, Rutgers Law School, presented on her book, Dignity Not Debt: An Abolitionist Approach to Economic Justice, with panelists Abbye Atkinson, Professor of Law and Co-Faculty Director of the Center for Law and Economic Justice, UC Berkeley Law School, and Pamela Foohey, Allen Post Professor of Law, University of Georgia School of Law. Ondersma’s work debunks the myths that have long governed debt policy, such as the belief that debt leads to prosperity or the claim that bad debt is the result of bad choices, both of which nest in the overarching myth of a free market unhindered by government interference and accessible to all.  

Robert Lawless and Norman I. Silber, Boas-Claster Distinguished Professor in Civil Procedure, Hofstra University Maurice A. Deane School of Law, and Visiting Professor of Law, Columbia Law School, joined Janger for the concluding roundtable discussion. Also participating in the symposium was Tara Twomey, former director of the Executive Office for U.S. Trustees, as well as former executive director of the National Consumer Bankruptcy Right Center; and Belisa Pang, who joins the University of Michigan Law School as assistant professor in fall 2025.   

President and Joseph Crea Dean David D. Meyer had presented welcoming remarks at the symposium’s launch, in which he celebrated not only “the gathering of this stellar group of scholars,” but also how “the broad scope of these issues has given rise to a unique partnership in this symposium,” through the sponsorship and collaboration of the Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law, the Center for the Study of Business Law and Regulation, and the Edward V. Sparer Public Interest Law Fellowship.