As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in America

by Teresa A. Sullivan, Elizabeth Warren, Jay Lawrence Westbrook

Bankruptcy in America is a booming business. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans each year have joined giant corporations, like Johns Manville and Continental Airlines, and once-wealthy individuals, like John Connally, in filing for bankruptcy. Is this dramatic growth a result of
mushrooming debt--consumer debt and consumer bankruptcy have both more than doubled since the late 1970s--or does it reflect a moreal decline that permits the middle class to evade their debts? As We Forgive Our Debtors addresses these questions with the data gathered in the largest empirical study
of consumer bankruptcy ever done in this country. The authors of this mulit-disciplinary study describe the law and the statistics in clear, nontechnical language, combining a thorough statistical description of the social and economic position of consumer bankrupts with human portraits of the
debtors and creditors whose journey has ended in bankruptcy court.
In addition to an overall picture of bankruptcy, As We Forgive Our Debtors devotes several chapters to hidden subgroups in bankruptcy. One focuses on women, analyzing the desperate financial circumstances of single women and the increasing pressure on one-income families. Another reveals that
more than half of the bankrupts are homeowners and discusses the anomalies in the way they are treated by current law. Other chapters examine the surprising role of medical debts in financial collapse and give a new account of the financial pressures on small businesses. The book also provides the
first detailed analysis ever done of the position of various types of creditors whose debtors go bankrupt. This book is destined to become a standard reference for sociologists who study wealth and income and for every credit manager in America. It will also bring to the legal and political
debates about bankruptcy law hard facts that will help legal scholars in many fields to measure the distance between armchair theorizing and the law in action.

Genres: Nonfiction

370 pages, Hardcover

First published November 16, 1989

Reviews

[Jennifer · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a landmark study of debtors and creditors in bankruptcy when it was released in 1990. Because it uses statistics from the early 1980's, the dollar figures are out of date today, but it remains interesting. I would be interested to see whether and how the explosion of consumer credit since the 80's might alter the results of a similar study today.

[Doris]

I requested As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in America on interloan from MeL and received a copy from the Library of Michigan. I did not finish reading it. I have read several other popular (rather than scholarly) books that Elizabeth Warren has written or co-authored and I've become quite a fan of hers.
I was curious about As We Forgive Our Debtors because of a Washington Post article of May 7, 2019 which said that the findings about consumer bankruptcy in this book had been the subject of criticism. One specific criticism mentioned in the WaPo article was that Warren did not take into account that bankruptcy filers will use bankruptcy strategically rather than as a desperate last resort when they are in an otherwise untenable position. However the authors DID include a chapter on "Credit Card Junkies" and take into account that there were bankruptcy filers who "tried bankruptcy once and liked it so much that they ran up more than a year's income in credit card debt and did it again." In retrospect, I think that particular criticism in the WaPo article was actually of Warren's current political stance on bankruptcy rather than of the scholarship in this book.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politi...