Court Opinion

ID: 9516615
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-06 23:47:06.121853+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:37:27.534600
License: Public Domain

CORNISH,
specially concurring:
I wholeheartedly concur in my colleagues’ learned and eloquent majority opinion, but feel compelled to address several additional concerns I have with this appeal. As I have stated on numerous occasions, both privately and publicly, the BAPCPA has, whether Congress intended it to or not, limited access to the bankruptcy courts of those persons who are most in need of debt relief. For example, in this case, Debtor’s car was repossessed approximately one week before she filed for Chapter 13 relief, according to her Petition.
Additionally, for the bankruptcy court to emphasize that Congress may have intended a waiting period between obtaining credit counseling and filing a petition in order to contemplate the information received is naive. Since passage of the BAPCPA, I have heard of only a few isolated instances in which a debtor has been persuaded by the required counseling either to defer filing or not to file a bankruptcy petition.
Heaven knows, we bankruptcy judges have plenty of work to do in refereeing conflicts between parties who are in actual disputes in our adversary system. However, the present case creates an artificial rift between parties who don’t have even the slightest fight to wage. In this case, Debtor’s counsel and the trustee are sitting on the sidelines as merely disinterested spectators while the trier of fact is doing all of the heavy lifting. One of the bankruptcy court’s reasons for raising the credit counseling timing issue on its own motion is its “concern that a debtor immediately or years later might find a creditor collecting a debt on the basis that Debtor was never discharged in this case.” I find the stated rationale invalid. During my tenure on the bankruptcy bench, I have rarely heard of a creditor ignoring a bankruptcy court’s discharge order and attempting to collect a debt or reopen a case based on its substituted judgment that such discharge was procedurally defective. Although we judges are sometimes tempted to snag a case and write about some interesting and challenging legal question raised by the BAPCPA, I think it best that we exercise restraint and wait for an aggrieved party to come before us in an actual adversarial dispute.
In reviewing the contents of Debtor’s Petition, she appears to be a typical debtor who is a candidate for a discharge. Had the order dismissing this case not been stayed, it would have triggered another set of barriers to Debtor’s refiling and obtaining automatic stay protection. To re-file, Debtor would have been required to pay duplicate court costs and attorney fees, which in most cases is an extreme economic barrier to those who can afford it the least.