BYU Law Review
Abstract
This Essay asks how bankruptcy judges ought to orient their substantial, statutory discretion in business reorganization cases. The motivating observation is that bankruptcy law enacts a kind of forced integration of productive assets. To shed light on the contemporary problems that bankruptcy judges face, I thus look to two classic approaches to the economic theory of the firm—from Oliver Williamson and from Oliver Hart. I conclude that nonjudicial institutions have largely surmounted the problems to which their theories point, leaving a different, and probably narrower, set of issues to worry about. Bankruptcy judges who have a notion that their job is, in part, to push parties to a “deal” should instead focus on policing efforts by some of a debtor’s investors to capture value from a recapitalization deal to which their pre-distress bargain does not entitle them.
Rights
© 2026 Brigham Young University Law Review
Recommended Citation
Vincent S.J. Buccola,
Bankruptcy Judging After Williamson,
51 BYU L. Rev.
653
(2026).
Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.byu.edu/lawreview/vol51/iss3/7
