Court Opinion

ID: 9547062
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 17:41:16.268279+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:17:15.893348
License: Public Domain

ZIMMERMAN, Justice,
concurring:
I join the majority, albeit somewhat reluctantly. Under federal law, a discharge in bankruptcy frees the debtor from the underlying liability that supports a lien on the debtor’s property. 11 U.S.C. § 524(a) (Supp.1987). However, federal bankruptcy law does not extinguish á lien on the debt- or’s property which is not avoided during the bankruptcy proceeding. See, e.g., In re Cassi, 24 B.R. 619, 626 (Bankr.N.D.Ind.1982); In re Nason, 22 B.R. 690, 691-92 (Bankr.D.Me.1982); In re Childers, 20 B.R. *940681, 683 (Bankr.W.D.Ky.1981). In the present case, the lien in question was not avoided during the bankruptcy proceeding. Therefore, federal law would have permitted the survival of a lien on the property of the debtor. Whether such a lien could continue to exist after the date of the bankruptcy, however, is a question of state law.
Under Utah law, once the lien was in place, it continued through the bankruptcy proceeding and could have been executed upon at any time until the end of its statutory eight-year life. However, once the eight-year period passed, the lien could not be renewed, as the majority observes, because under the Utah statute, a lien can be renewed only by the fictional renewing of the underlying debt. Because the bankruptcy court had discharged the underlying personal liability, it was impossible to renew the lien under the Utah statute.
Although I agree with the majority that section 78-22-1 of the Code does require the result reached in this case, I find it rather arbitrary and certainly not a result that the legislature would have intended had it foreseen the interaction of the federal bankruptcy law and the state lien law. I can think of no sound policy reason for extinguishing a lien that has survived bankruptcy merely because eight years have passed since the date of the initial judgment. However, it is impossible to interpret our statute as permitting survival of the lien without the survival of the underlying liability. For that reason alone, I join the majority in affirming the result below.