MEGAN DALTON DOYLE

2024 Supreme Court decision, Harrington v. Purdue Pharma, resolved a decades-long Circuit split regarding nonconsensual nondebtor releases in Chapter 11 bankruptcy cases. On nonpartisan lines, the Court held that Purdue Pharma’s bankruptcy plan could not include a provision releasing the Sackler brothers from the claims pending against them. In doing so, it expressly disallowed nonconsensual nondebtor releases in any Chapter 11 bankruptcy. However, the Court left open an important question: What qualifies as a nonconsensual nondebtor release?

In the months that followed, bankruptcy courts started to promulgate differing opinions regarding such consensual releases. This Note aims to determine what the best next steps are in light of the Supreme Court’s decision. Part I briefly discusses a background on Chapter 11 and the Circuit split regarding nonconsensual nondebtor releases. Part II analyzes the Supreme Court’s Purdue Pharma decision and the unique circumstances surrounding the case. Part III highlights a few lower court decisions of note which occurred in the months immediately following the Purdue Pharma decision. These cases illuminate two different ways to determine “consent” in the context of Chapter 11 bankruptcies: “opt-in” or “opt-out” releases. Finally, Part IV weighs the benefits and disadvantages of “opt-in” and “opt-out” releases and ultimately concludes that such decisions are best left to the Legislature.

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BENJAMIN MINHAO CHEN

For a long time, linguistic canons have been dismissed as dissonant and deficient. But there are ambitions to make linguistic canons guide again. Maxim majoritarianism promises to dissolve opposing canons through the elimination of unsupported pretenders. By empirically identifying the canons that register dominant habits of speech, contemporary jurists hope to bring order to the practice of statutory interpretation.

This Article submits that maxim majoritarianism is futile. It argues that arbitrating between rival canons poses conceptual difficulties that are virtually impossible to resolve. At the same time, it maintains that the co-existence of canon and counter-canon is not necessarily embarrassing. Like practical proverbs, linguistic canons can—and can only—matter if they change beliefs, judgments, and actions—that is, if they are efficacious.

So, do linguistic canons matter? An original experiment tests the efficacy of four classic canons on over 1,500 everyday speakers of English. The last antecedent rule, noscitur a sociis, did not seem to influence how participants construed ambiguous text whereas expressio unius did. These results might be interpreted as further proof of the hollowness of linguistic canons. Yet they also leave open the possibility that linguistic canons can, by signaling avenues of further inquiry, cast fresh light on the ordinary meaning of the law.

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DANIEL B. ROSENBAUM

County governments occupy an awkward dual position in the sub-federal system. They are both local governments (democratic bodies, akin to cities and towns) and state agents (administrative units of state government, akin to departments and agencies). Neither role seems to suit counties particularly well. When acting as local democratic bodies, counties are constrained by state law and severely under-resourced, especially in contrast with municipal governments in their midst. As administrative agents of the state, moreover, counties are saddled with a cascade of responsibilities that the state has delegated to the regional level, duties they must perform without the same support afforded prototypal state agencies. A county’s dissimilar roles thus share one unifying theme. On paper, as the slim legal literature on county governments has observed, counties are passive, static, and relatively powerless actors in both their local and state manifestations. Continue reading →

Adrian Ivashkiv

Litigation finance now bankrolls some of the highest-profile lawsuits, attracting both attention and controversy. Because this new market facilitates lawsuits, it might serve either to promote access to justice or to facilitate frivolous, speculative litigation. This Article offers two insights for that ongoing debate. First, it argues that the market for investable lawsuits may be much smaller than is often imagined, muting its social impact in either direction. Second, it provides new reasons to think that, to the degree that litigation finance facilitates new lawsuits, those suits are unlikely to be frivolous. Continue reading →

Charles Gardner Geyh

It’s a great time to be alive for a judicial ethicist. There aren’t very many of us. We tend to tag along in the shadow of the lawyer ethics people—the cool kids in the schoolyard. Pimply and off-putting though we may be, we have a particular set of skills that, thanks to the Supreme Court and its recent shenanigans, have suddenly acquired relevance as judicial misconduct has been thrust into the national spotlight. So don’t step on my moment. I want to make the most of it. Continue reading →