Professor Andrea Coles-Bjerre, the UO faculty’s expert on bankruptcy law, has been invited to join the prestigious Powell on Real Property treatise, covering its treatment of real estate in bankruptcy. The Powell treatise originated over a half-century ago, yet it remains modern and heavily cited, including in the US Supreme Court.
The intersection of bankruptcy and real estate is rich, because bankruptcy law engages so heavily with property rights and contract rights – both their initial state-law allocation and their federal restructuring or reorganization.
The Bankruptcy Code deals in intricate and important ways with, for example, real property leases including a debtor’s power to reject, for the benefit of its creditors other than the non-debtor counterparty, a lease that turns out to be burdensome.
In these turbulent economic times, real estate related bankruptcy filings are expected to increase, particularly because governmentally imposed moratoria on evictions do not erase the debt in question, but merely push it back for future resurfacing. New legal issues are certain to emerge, too. “With just a couple of exceptions, the Code hasn’t even truly caught up yet with the issues emerging from the subprime mortgage crisis of 10 and 12 years ago,” Coles-Bjerre observes, “but it’s a remarkably supple statute, and judges, advocates, and transactional lawyers have been nimble in using the current Code to respond.” She adds that she is “greatly looking forward to contributing to Powell on issues both “new and established.”
Coles-Bjerre, or ACB as her students like to call her, currently teaches Bankruptcy and Business Bankruptcy, and serves as Faculty Director of the Business Law Program.
By School of Law Communications