Abstract: Throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, over-indebted people engaged in large, vigorous campaigns to demand governments’ protection from ruinous debt. Their appeals to state legislatures across the country extended into the national arena, leading the U.S. to have one of the most protective debt relief regimes in the world by the end of the 19th century. Yet by the second half of the twentieth century, culminating in a creditor-led retrenchment of the bankruptcy code in 2005. Emily Zackin will discuss The Political Development of American Debt Relief (co-authored with Chloe Thurston). The talk will explore key episodes in the development of debt-relief law in order to explain the uneven political mobilization of debtors and creditors over time, and the conditions that allowed each side at various times to bend the law toward their preferences.
