Odd Man out: The Survival of Junior Lien Strip-offs in Chapter 13 following the Caulkett Decision Article
Date of Publication:
Recommended Citation
Theresa J. Pulley Radwan, Odd Man out: The Survival of Junior Lien Strip-offs in Chapter 13 following the Caulkett Decision, 75 Oklahoma Law Review 457 (2023)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
The bankruptcy system seeks to strike a balance between promoting a fresh start for a debtor in financial distress and a fair and equitable distribution of the debtor's assets to its creditors.' But among creditors, equitable does not mean equal, and some creditors enjoy more protection both within and outside of the bankruptcy system. Among the most protected creditors in bankruptcy are those with a prepetition security interest in the debtor's assets, and among the most protected of these secured creditors are those with a lien on the debtor's residential property in a Chapter 13 case. Yet those creditors-ones with a residential lien in Chapter 13-may find themselves losing the protection of that lien in bankruptcy. Lien-stripping may occur in individual cases at any time, but an interest in lien-stripping particularly increases any time the housing market declines, such as when the debts secured by those homes may exceed the value of the collateral itself. While Supreme Court case law denies the ability to undo liens in any Chapter 7 case and in some Chapter 13 cases, the Court still must determine the ability to strip off "wholly unsecured" liens in Chapter 13 cases. The circuit courts overwhelmingly allow such a strip-off, leaving creditors in those cases singularly unprotected.' While previous law review articles and legal scholarship have analyzed this issue,' many did so prior to the most recent Supreme Court decision in 2015, and these articles often consider the impact on strip-off generally. This Article reconsiders the result of that decision and the impact of seemingly inconsistent results, both on Chapter 13 strip-off cases and on Chapter 20 cases," where courts frequently disagree on the appropriate result.