Faculty Bibliography

Explore millions of resources from scholarly journals, books, newspapers, videos and more, on the ProQuest Platform.

Research shows, for example, that federal spending on things like safe housing and nutrition assistance for babies makes people healthier and reduces total health costs. [...]because of the rules Congress set, cbo cost estimates for these programs cannot assume taxpayers would save any money on health insurance costs or that taxpayers would spend less on Medicaid. Reforming these economic models would not be easy. cbo cost estimates generally exclude the potential macroeconomic effects of a proposed policy precisely because, as they explain it, they have too few analysts to crunch the numbers. [...]policymakers need to remember that modeling the costs and benefits of major public policies isn't just about numbers-it's also about our values.

The dramatic collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange, FTX, may have come as a shock to the Miami Heat, Tom Brady, Twitter bots and financial-news talking heads. But crypto is following a well-worn path of financial innovations, such as subprime mortgages and credit-default swaps, that began with dazzling rewards and ended with crippling losses.

President Biden presided over the best midterm elections for the party in the White House in 20 years — despite Washington insiders predicting that Democrats would be wiped out.

TIME 100 Next Leaders When they emigrated from Nigeria, Wally Adeyemo’s parents - a nurse and an elementary-school principal - could scarcely have imagined that their young son would quickly grow to become one of the U.S.’s top economic policymakers. Having previously worked in the Obama White House, the Treasury Department, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Adeyemo serves today as Deputy Treasury Secretary - the first Black American to hold the job. Adeyemo’s fortitude in helping drive our economic response to Russia’s war in Ukraine earned him the distinction of being sanctioned and blacklisted by Vladimir Putin.

Bankruptcy and Article 9: 2022 Statutory Supplement is offered in two versions. Both are smaller, lighter, and more portable than competing Supplements. Each version includes: UCC Article 1, UCC Article 9, key excerpts from UCC Article 2 and UCC Article 8, Uniform Fraudulent Transfer Act, Uniform Voidable Transactions Act, Uniform Motor Vehicle Certificate of Title and Anti-Theft Act, Bankruptcy Code, selections from the Bankruptcy Rules Title 18 and Title 28 of the United States Code, Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, and Federal Tax Lien Act. This year’s Supplements contain numerous changes to the Bankruptcy Code. Notably, many of the amendments from the COVID-19 Bankruptcy Relief Extension Act of 2021 sunsetted and have been removed. The Bankruptcy Code includes a provision for readjustment of certain dollar figures at three-year intervals. All of those amounts changed this year. The changes were effective April 1, 2022. In the course of a career, the number of state and federal statutes that a serious practitioner of commercial law would likely consult must surely reach into the hundreds. Not many practitioners would try to carry such statutes around, either in books or in their heads. But a few statutes are used over and over. Together, those few form the core of two basic subjects in commercial law, secured transactions and bankruptcy. Those core statutes are reproduced in this slender volume.

Democrats are the party of working people. Ahead of the 2020 election, we advanced ideas and plans that we believed would, in ways big and small, make our democracy and our economy work better for all Americans. Across this country, voters agreed with us — and gave us a majority in Washington so that we could deliver on those promises.

One of the leading casebooks in the field, The Law of Debtors and Creditors features 39 problem sets with realistic questions a lawyer considers in managing a bankruptcy case. It also challenges the students with the major policy and theoretical questions in the field. The text features a functional organization as a bankruptcy case would unfold. The focus is on teaching through the realistic problems, complete with ethical difficulties embedded into the fact patterns. The presentation is lively and colloquial. Explanatory text throughout makes bankruptcy law accessible to students and easier to teach. Because it divides the subject between consumer and business bankruptcy, professors can select the depth of coverage for each subject in designing a two-, three-, or four-credit class. The authors—Senator Elizabeth Warren, Congresswoman Katie Porter, and Professors Pottow (Michigan) and Westbrook (Texas)—are among the most prominent in the field. Uniquely comprehensive Teacher’s Manual—chock full of material on how to design class around the problem sets, citations to new cases and literature, and suggestions for steering class discussion.

American workers and families don’t want handouts. They want everybody to play by the same rules.

The Supplement includes the entire Uniform Commercial Code as of May 2021, excluding Article 6, and also includes a selection of other federal statutes and regulations, uniform state laws, and Restatement provisions, aiming to include those items most commonly used in commercial law courses. This leads, among other things, to the inclusion of the Truth in Lending Act, Electronic Funds Transfer Act, the Federal Tax Lien Act, the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act, excerpts from the CISG, and from the ICC’s uniform rules for letters of credit. The Bankruptcy Code, as of June 1, 2021, is reproduced in full. Unlike the UCC, there are no official comments for the Bankruptcy Code, and the legislative history is spotty at best. As a result, only the Code is offered here. In addition, selections from Title 18 and Title 28 of the United States Code that are relevant to bankruptcy law are included.

This year’s Supplements contain numerous amendments to the Bankruptcy Code. They are from the COVID-19 Bankruptcy Relief Extension Act of 2021, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, and the Bankruptcy Administrative Improvement Act of 2020. The Supplement also contains new UCC comments on protected series and the effect of bad faith purchase at an Article 9 sale. It also contains minor amendments to the Bankruptcy Rules and the bankruptcy related provisions of Title 28. In the course of a career, the number of state and federal statutes that a serious practitioner of commercial law would likely consult must surely reach into the hundreds. Not many practitioners would try to carry such statutes around, either in books or in their heads. But a few statutes are used over and over. Together, those few form the core of two basic subjects in commercial law, secured transactions and bankruptcy. Those core statutes are reproduced in this slender volume.

Famously persistent, Senator Warren shares six perspectives that have influenced her life and advocacy, knowing that if we’re willing to fight for it, profound political transformation is possible., "Elizabeth Warren is a beacon for everyone who believes that real change can improve the lives of all Americans. Committed, fearless, and famously persistent, she brings her best game to every battle she wages. In Persist, Warren writes about six perspectives that have influenced her life and advocacy. She’s a mother who learned from wrenching personal experience why child care is so essential. She’s a teacher who has known since grade school the value of a good and affordable education. She’s a planner who understands that every complex problem requires a comprehensive response. She’s a fighter who discovered the hard way that nobody gives up power willingly. She’s a learner who thinks, listens, and works to fight racism in America. And she’s a woman who has proven over and over that women are just as capable as men. Candid and compelling, Persist is both a deeply personal book and a powerful call to action. Elizabeth Warren–one of our nation’s most visionary leaders–will inspire everyone to believe that if we’re willing to fight for it, profound change is well within our reach." – inside front jacket flap.

For too long, giant tech companies have thrown around their weight to crush competition, exploit user data and spread disinformation. They may think they're too big to be held accountable, but Lina Khan is proving them wrong. Since Khan published her blockbuster Yale Law Journal article "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox" in 2017--written while she was still a law student, she has been the leading intellectual force in the modern antitrust movement. Her writings and advocacy have pushed scholars, lawyers, activists and public officials to think differently about Big Tech. Khan has also been a critical figure in government, providing advice to countless elected officials, working at the Federal Trade Commission and staffing the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Antitrust.

Ady Barkan is one of "Time" magazine's 100 most influential people. An American lawyer and liberal activist, Ady is also a health care warrior. For him, getting up has become a chore harder than most could imagine. In 2016, Ady was diagnosed with ALS. Even as the disease has robbed him of movement and even the capacity to speak, he uses every last breath to stop drug and insurance companies from standing between Americans and the basic health care they need. And right now, during the COVID-19 crisis and the following economic collapse, Ady has been a powerful force for good: drawing attention to the broken health care system, supporting frontline health care workers, and pushing for relief for working people as they get sick and lose their jobs. In the fight for social justice, change never comes easy. But Ady and the movement he has behind him bring Americans closer while making health care in America a basic human right.

One of the leading casebooks in the field, The Law of Debtors and Creditors features forty problem sets with realistic questions a lawyer considers in confronting the statutory provisions for a bankruptcy case. Explanatory text throughout makes bankruptcy law accessible to students and easier to teach. The material is organized functionally--as a bankruptcy case would unfold--making the presentation logical and sensible. By separating consumer bankruptcy from business bankruptcy, professors can select the depth of coverage for each course. The Seventh Edition produces expanded coverage of business bankruptcy topics such as corporate governance in bankruptcy and bankruptcy sales. Discussion of over a half-dozen recent Supreme Court cases on bankruptcy includes Stern v. Marshall. Adjustments to teaching approach to means test and other 2005 amendment topics reflect existing law and practice and help students learn.

Professor Pardo has published a pointed critique to our Report, raising three major complaints. First, he claims that we make two predicating assumptions in our study that are flawed. Second, he contends that we misunderstand the means test and fail to appreciate with sufficient "nuance" its "operative effect." Third, he maintains that our Report suffers from methodological problems. We can address the two impugned assumptions quickly. The first one - that BAPCPA's means test is the sole causal agent driving 800,000 putative filers from the bankruptcy courts - is not one we make. The second - regarding the income profiles of the missing 800,000 bankruptcy filers - is actually somewhat consistent with predictions Professor Pardo himself makes elsewhere in his critique. The thrust of Professor Pardo's commentary, however, is his second point - that we simply "don't get" the means test - and so we begin our response by addressing this contention. We then discuss our methodology, which we believe is quite robust, before finally elaborating on why we are sanguine in dismissing his complaints with the two assumptions he claims we make.

Background: Our 2001 study in 5 states found that medical problems contributed to at least 46.2% of all bankruptcies. Since then, health costs and the numbers of un- and underinsured have increased, and bankruptcy laws have tightened. Methods: We surveyed a random national sample of 2314 bankruptcy filers in 2007, abstracted their court records, and interviewed 1032 of them. We designated bankruptcies as “medical” based on debtors' stated reasons for filing, income loss due to illness, and the magnitude of their medical debts. Results: Using a conservative definition, 62.1% of all bankruptcies in 2007 were medical; 92% of these medical debtors had medical debts over $5000, or 10% of pretax family income. The rest met criteria for medical bankruptcy because they had lost significant income due to illness or mortgaged a home to pay medical bills. Most medical debtors were well educated, owned homes, and had middle-class occupations. Three quarters had health insurance. Using identical definitions in 2001 and 2007, the share of bankruptcies attributable to medical problems rose by 49.6%. In logistic regression analysis controlling for demographic factors, the odds that a bankruptcy had a medical cause was 2.38-fold higher in 2007 than in 2001. Conclusions: Illness and medical bills contribute to a large and increasing share of US bankruptcies.

Although Chapter 11 has served as a model for bankruptcy reform around the world, the conventional wisdom has been that it is characterized by a relatively low success rate and endless delay. The data from large samples of Chapter 11 cases filed in 1994 and 2002 demonstrate that this characterization is wrong. Nearly all troubled companies choose Chapter 11 over Chapter 7 liquidation, which means that the system serves a critical screening function to eliminate hopeless cases relatively quickly. Almost half the unsuccessful cases were jettisoned within six months and almost eighty percent were gone within a year. The cases that survive the early screening result in confirmed plans of reorganization around seventy percent of the time. The mistaken conventional view has not only skewed the academic debate, but also prompted changes to the statute in 2005 regarding small business reorganizations, changes that may have produced little benefit in reducing delay at the price of blocking many small business reorganizations of a sort that were succeeding prior to the amendments.

Physical products, from toasters and lawnmowers, to infant car seats and toys, to meat and drugs, are routinely inspected and regulated for safety. Credit products, like mortgage loans and credit cards, on the other hand, are left largely unregulated, even though they can also be unsafe. Because financial products are analyzed through a contract paradigm rather than a products paradigm, consumers have been left with unsafe credit products. These dangerous products can lead to financial distress, bankruptcy, and foreclosure, and, as evidenced by the recent subprime crisis, they can have devastating effects on communities and on the economy. In this Article, we use the physical products analogy to build a case, supported by both theory and data, for comprehensive safety regulation of consumer credit. We then examine the present state of consumer credit regulation, explaining why the current regulatory regime has systematically failed to provide meaningful safety regulations. We propose a fundamental restructuring of this regime, urging the creation of a new federal regulator that will have both the authority and the incentives to police the safety of consumer credit products.

Because of product safety regulations, exploding toasters and other dangerous products are rare in the American marketplace. Despite the fact that financial products can also be dangerous, with terms as incomprehensible as an electrical wiring diagram, regulation is far less comprehensive. Most financial regulation turns on the identity of the issuer—federal bank, state thrift, and private issuer—rather than on the product itself. Instead of using safety experts, financial products are regulated mainly by agencies whose principal responsibility is to protect the profitability of the financial institutions that issue the products. A Financial Product Safety Commission would provide coherent regulation of financial products, eliminating their most dangerous features.

Just three years ago, Congress enacted controversial amendments to the Bankruptcy Code. The proponents claimed that the changes would drive the "can pay" debtors (of which there were supposedly many) from the bankruptcy courts with tough new income-based eligibility requirements. And indeed, after the enactment of the amendments, the number of people filing for bankruptcy plunged. In this Article - the initial report of the 2007 Consumer Bankruptcy Project - the authors analyze the first national, random sample of post-amendments bankruptcy filers. Contrary to the advocates' claim that high-income filers would be driven from the system and, by implication, that those remaining would have more modest incomes, the data show no change in the income levels of bankruptcy filers after the amendments. These findings thus cast doubt on the suggestion that those purged from the bankruptcy courts - approximately 800,000 in 2007 alone based on trend extrapolation - were high-income deadbeats; they instead appear to have been ordinary American families in serious financial distress. The data also show that debtors filing for bankruptcy in 2007 have even greater debt loads than their counterparts from 2001, a development that seems to track a national trend of increasing consumer debt. The findings thus align with at least two predictions of some legal scholars. The first is that the bankruptcy reform bill was not aimed at high-income abusers but was instead a general assault on all debtors, regardless of their financial circumstances. The second is that debtors are waiting longer - and incurring more debt - before ultimately seeking bankruptcy relief, consistent with the so-called "sweat box" theory of credit card lending.

On March 20, 2006, the Harvard Journal on Legislation held a public symposium addressing the diminishing social safety net for the middle class. This piece briefly presents some of the issues that were discussed during the symposium, explains their increasing relevance for the middle class, and introduces two articles by symposium panelists that address some of these issue in greater depth.

Chapter 11 has greatly influenced bankruptcy reforms all over the world, but has been attacked as imposing great costs and delay with relatively meager rates of success as measured by confirmation of plans. Although some recent data have hinted at a less negative picture of the efficiency of Chapter 11, it is now also claimed it has become a mere liquidation device controlled for the benefit of creditors, with equity owners dismissed at the door. This paper reports data from two large multi-district studies of business bankruptcy for cases filed in 1994 and 2002. It finds a confirmation rate up to 70% among cases with a realistic change of success and an overall system that disposes of losers quite early in the process. The paper confirms that there was a sharp increase in the use of Chapter 11 for liquidation between 1994 and 2002, but reports that equity owners still retain an interest going forward in a majority of cases.

If college is to be the gateway to security and success, then a new financing mechanism is essential, one that lets students take responsibility for the cost of their own educations without burdening their families unduly, forcing them into career choices that push them out of public service, or mortgaging their futures. Our Service Pays proposal is designed to give every student who wants to work hard a means of paying for college - and to give young people an economically viable option to engage in public service for a few years after college. After describing the high costs of college and the risks associated with student debt, the paper outlines the Service Pays program. The federal government would increase the amount students can borrow in the unsubsidized Stafford loan program, offering money for four years of college tuition, fees, and room and board to any student (regardless of family income) on the same terms as current student loans. The dollar amounts of the available loans would be pegged to average prices at public four-year colleges and universities, and students would have four years to work off those loans. The government would forgive students one year of college expenses for each year the student worked in public service after college. The paper then considers the types of service opportunities that would be eligible, the expected benefits of service, and the likely costs of Service Pays.

As part of an international symposium on consumer bankruptcy, we address some of the 2005 changes in the U.S. bankruptcy law. We outline briefly the political climate that led to the 2005 changes, and then we examine the four changes that are likely to have the greatest effect on families in financial trouble. We single out the new consumer credit counseling requirements as providing virtually no help to debtors, serving instead as one more costly hurdle a debtor must jump before filing bankruptcy. Means testing for chapter 7 eligibility has created confusion and perverse incentives for debtors. New burdens and restrictions on attorneys have increased the cost of legal representation. Finally, although not as widely publicized as other changes, new rules requiring audits of bankruptcy filings could significantly change how bankruptcy filers assert legal positions in their petitions and schedules. After considering these changes, we describe the plans of the 2007 Consumer Bankruptcy Project to go into the field to collect data on more than 2,000 bankruptcy filers.

Illness and injury have a significant financial impact on families, but recent news media reporting and lawmaker responses have framed these issues in terms of hospital mistreatment of the uninsured. In this article, we argue that the hospital misbehavior model imposes artificial parameters on a much broader health care finance problem. We demonstrate this empirically, using new data from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project to show that even insured families experience a wide range of direct and indirect financial consequences of illness or injury, including income loss. We also engage in a positive analysis of debtor-creditor law to challenge the assumption that hospitals misbehave when they engage in routine debt collection. Our health care finance system depends in part on self-pay obligation, and lawmakers in some states have given medical providers enhanced collection powers and incentives to be diligent beyond those given to other creditors. When hospitals engage in regular types of collection activity within the boundaries set by debtor-creditor law, they are playing out the role assigned to them by the health care finance system. We recognize that some hospitals have engaged in wrongdoing, and we cannot rule out the possibility that proposed changes in response to the hospital misbehavior model will have positive effects for some uninsured patients. Yet, we suspect that the negatives will outweigh the positives. If lawmakers believe they have solved the health care finance problem by imposing new limits on hospital behavior, they are less likely to tackle the larger issues that leave millions of responsible people struggling financially after a serious medical problem. The hospital misbehavior model also imposes costs on hospitals that hospitals may be ill equipped to bear, and it may lead to further reduction of necessary services at not-for-profit facilities. We recommend replacing the hospital misbehavior model with an expanded vision of health care finance issues that includes all forms of medical debt, direct non-medical costs, third-party payers, and lost income and opportunity - a full range of the economic fallout from a serious medical problems.

In this essay we offer brief reflections on the best process for critiquing empirical work in law and sustaining an engagement between theoretical and empirical approaches. We emphasize the importance of theoretical work in helping to shape the scholarly agenda, but we urge that theory should be more closely tied to fact. We illustrate our argument by responding to a recent critique of our own empirical work by Professor Rasmussen. His principal claim is that our work should be discounted because we reported on all business bankruptcies, both those of entrepreneurs and those in corporate form. In response, we reanalyze our data, separating the individuals from the corporations; in every case the re-analyzed data support the conclusions of our original paper to the same extent or more strongly. Similarly, his other claims about our work are shown to be incorrect.

A central concern in domestic economic policy has been the great increase in consumer bankruptcy filings since 1980. That concern was a major cause of the adoption of the 2005 amendments to the Bankruptcy Code. We analyze the data from three studies of consumer bankruptcy over twenty years to learn more about the causes of that increase. One consistent claim has been that a decline in reputational loss (stigma) has made filing for bankruptcy easier, thus explaining the rise in filings. The principal competing claim has been that increased filings arise from increased financial distress. We find that the declining-stigma hypothesis is implausible because the data show that consumer bankrupts are even more indebted now than their counterparts were in 1981 and 1991 and that there is no identifiable group of less-indebted bankrupts that were tempted into bankruptcy by reduced reputational costs. Those data and other factors support an inference that the stigma of bankruptcy may have increased over the past twenty years.

David Dranove and Michael Millenson seem determined to deny that financial fallout from illness pushes middle-class families into bankruptcy. Anxious to erase the headline that three-quarters of U.S. medical bankrupts had health insurance at the onset of their illnesses and the resulting spotlight on inadequate coverage and insurance cancellation practices, they ignore most of our data and misrepresent the rest. They dismiss families’ explanations of their difficulties and blame those ruined by illness for their own problems. However, the data from the bankruptcy courts are undeniable. Bankruptcies affect mainly middle-class, privately insured families, and about half are triggered, at least in part, by illnesses.

University of Wisconsin Professor Marc Galanter has assembled some startling data suggesting that even as the population grows and the number of lawsuits grows even faster, the trial has been on a sharp decline. The percentage of federal civil lawsuits that end in trial has shrunk from 11.5% in 1962 to 1.8% in 2002. Even more startling, is that the absolute number of trials has declined as well. Professor Galanter summarizes the prevalent theories to explain the data. The Diminished Supply Theory revolves around the notion that there are fewer disputes or that fewer disputes now make it to court. The Diversion Theory holds that newer non-trial alternatives, such as ADR, have drained off cases that otherwise would have gone to trial. The Economic Theory pins the decline in trials to the rising expense of trials. Professor Galanter asks the provocative question: How is the character of the law changed in the absence of trials? The reported changes in filing rates for businesses and non-businesses over time suggests that within the overall bankruptcy system, there are different strands of experiences, and that the number of routine cases, denominated as non-business, is multiplying much faster than the number of more complex business cases. The growth of these cases suggests that bankruptcy is serving an important-and growing-role to resolve many potential disputes through a largely routine administrative structure.

Although data from the Administrative Office (AO) of the U.S. Courts suggest that only a small fraction of the 1.6 million bankruptcies filed each year are business failures, new research from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project reveals that roughly 17 percent of bankruptcy filings involve the failure of a business. First, the AO's count of the number of business bankruptcy filings is discussed in light of figures from datasets that directly contradict the AO data. It is then argued that attorneys' tendency to misclassify bankruptcy cases filed with automated form software systematically skews the AO data so that fewer cases are reported than actually exist. Data gathered from a 2001 survey of 1,771 Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 filers, 911 of whom were interviewed by telephone, suggest that AO figures vastly undercount the percentage of bankruptcy filers with a failed business. In fact, nearly 99 percent of the debtors in the survey sample who were identified as business owners appeared in the AO data as non-business cases. An apparent downward trend in business bankruptcies in recent years appears to be inaccurate. It is noted that the tremendous inaccuracy of the government's data on business bankruptcies has implications for bankruptcy policy and legislation.

In 2001, 1.458 million American families filed for bankruptcy. To investigate medical contributors to bankruptcy we surveyed 1771 personal bankruptcy filers in five Federal courts, and subsequently completed in-depth interviews with 931 of them. About half of debtors cited medical causes, indicating that between 1.850 and 2.227 million Americans (filers plus dependents) experienced medical bankruptcy. Among individuals whose illness led to bankruptcy, out-of-pocket costs averaged $11,854 since the start of illness; 75.7% had insurance at the onset of illness. Medical debtors were 42% more likely than other debtors to experience lapses in coverage. Even middle class, insured families often fall prey to financial catastrophe when sick.

This article draws upon data from a large empirical study of business bankruptcy cases to cast serious doubt upon two of the fundamental premises required to support claims that bankruptcy law should be replaced by default procedures established by contract. A number of proposals have been made to privatize the bankruptcy process by contract. The proponents of these contractualist approaches assume that default structures bargained in the marketplace will reduce transaction costs and improve post-default outcomes. Although these proposals necessarily affect materially the interests of third parties, their proponents suggest devices that are claimed to make that process efficient and non-redistributive. One premise underlying a contractual approach is that third parties can adjust their prices and terms to account for the effects of the proposed bankruptcy contracts. Prior scholarship has cast doubt on this premise by identifying categories of involuntary and maladjusting creditors who could not make such adjustments. This article for the first time quantifies that critique, showing that in most business bankruptcies there are many such involuntary or maladjusting creditors. Second, contractual theories necessarily assume that many or most business bankruptcies involve relatively few claims, because numerous claims, especially small ones, would impose transaction costs that are substantial enough to make individual negotiation or even unilateral adjustment by each creditor impossible. In fact, the data reveal that the typical business bankruptcy case presents many claims that are too small to be adjusting. These data demonstrate that a contractualist system will likely produce substantial inefficiencies, including a redistribution of wealth to the parties to the proposed bankruptcy contracts. The data support the superiority of a model of bankruptcy law that provides a non-waivable, collective infrastructure for the resolution of a multiparty economic problem.

This year more children will live through their parents' bankruptcy than their parents' divorce. The signs of economic distress for families with children are everywhere. Foreclosures have more than trebled in the past two decades, and families with children are now about 40 percent more likely to lose their homes to foreclosure than their childless counterparts. A family with minor children is nearly three times more likely to file for bankruptcy. These data are particularly shocking because the number of two-income households has soared as millions of mothers have poured into the workplace. Moreover, women raising children alone are now better equipped for financial independence than ever before in history. The reasons for their failure offer critical insights into how structural changes in the economy and families' efforts to cope with those changes have left millions of middle class households at risk for financial collapse. Using both national data and original data from the 2001 Consumer Bankruptcy Project, it is possible to explore the increasing vulnerability of middle class households. Families have tried to build their own safety nets, sending all adults into the workforce, but, as these data show, they have not succeeded in outrunning the growing risks of job loss, medical problems, and divorce. Their financial failures illustrate how today's social safety net offers inadequate protection to many hard-working, middle-class families. Identifying the problem is a necessary first step in any discussion about how to improve legal and economic systems.

In this revolutionary exposé, Harvard Law School bankruptcy expert Elizabeth Warren and financial consultant Amelia Tyagi show that today's middle-class parents are increasingly trapped by financial meltdowns. Astonishingly, sending mothers to work has made families more vulnerable to financial disaster than ever before. Today's two-income family earns 75% more money than its single-income counterpart of a generation ago, but has 25% less discretionary income to cover living costs. This is "the rare financial book that sidesteps accusations of individual wastefulness to focus on institutional changes," raved the Boston Globe. Warren and Tyagi reveal how the ferocious bidding war for housing and education has silently engulfed America's suburbs, driving up the cost of keeping families in the middle class. The authors show why the usual remedies-child-support enforcement, subsidized daycare, and higher salaries for women-won't solve the problem. But as the Wall Street Journal observed, "The book is brimming with proposed solutions to the nail-biting anxiety that the middle class finds itself in: subsidized day care, school vouchers, new bank regulation, among other measures." From Senator Edward M. Kennedy to Dr. Phil to Bill Moyers, The Two-Income Trap has created a sensation among economists, politicians, and families-all those who care about America's middle-class crisis.