Riding the Wave: Visiting and Revisiting the Automatic Stay, Discharge Injunction, and Sanctions in the Wake of Fulton v. City of Chicago and Taggart v. Lorenzen

Keith L. Rucinski, CPA is an attorney and the chapter 13 trustee for the Northern District of Ohio in Akron, appointed in October 2008. He has served as an expert witness in bankruptcy for private attorneys, state prosecutors and the U.S. Department of Justice.

Mr. Rucinski has taught more than 30 graduate and undergraduate courses in taxes, financial statement analysis, accounting and business law, and he has published several articles in the areas of bankruptcy and accounting. In addition, he has been a seminar speaker for numerous local and national organizations.

Mr. Rucinski is a member of ABI and the National Association of Chapter 13 Trustees, Ohio State Bar Association, Ohio Society of CPAs, Akron Bar Association and Federal Bar Association, and he is a life member of the Sixth Circuit Judicial Conference. He received his B.S. in business administration with a concentration in finance from the University of Akron and his J.D. from the University of Akron School of Law.

Prof. John A.E. Pottow is the John Philip Dawson Collegiate Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor, Mich., and is an internationally recognized expert in the field of bankruptcy and commercial law. His award-winning scholarship concentrates on the issues involved in the regulation of cross-border insolvencies, as well as consumer financial distress, and his extensive public service work focuses on international trade and the pro bono representation of bankrupt debtors. On behalf of the U.S.,

Prof. Pottow serves on the delegation to the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) and serves on the State Department’s Advisory Committee on Private International Law. In addition, he co-authors one of the leading bankruptcy textbooks in the country: The Law of Debtors and Creditors. Prof. Pottow has published in prominent legal journals in the U.S. and Canada and testified before both Houses of Congress.

A frequent lecturer, he has presented his works at academic conferences around the world and frequently provides commentary for national and international media outlets, such as NPR, CNBC, CNN, C-SPAN, Al Jazeera America and the BBC. His pro bono representations have ranged from bankruptcy court to the Supreme Court, where he successfully argued on behalf of the respondent in Executive Benefits Insurance Agency v. Arkison (2014).

Prior to joining the Michigan Law faculty in 2003, Prof. Pottow worked at several prominent firms in private practice, including Weil, Gotshal and Manges in New York and Hill & Barlow in Boston, where his practice focused on debtor representation in complex chapter 11 restructurings. He also was an active litigator whose trial work included representing a gender-based asylum-seeker from Afghanistan in U.S. Immigration Court.

Prof. Pottow is a licensed barrister and solicitor in Ontario and attorney in Massachusetts and Michigan. In 2005, he was presented the L. Hart Wright Award for Excellence in Teaching and, in 2012, received a pro bono award from the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of Michigan. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute, American College of Bankruptcy and International Insolvency Institute.

Prof. Pottow received his A.B. in psychology summa cum laude from Harvard College and his J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he served as treasurer of the Harvard Law Review.

Karlene A. Archer is a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society of Mid-New York in Syracuse, N.Y. She previously was an associate in the Bankruptcy and Financial Restructuring Group at WilmerHale in Boston and later at Bradley Arant Boult Cummings in Nashville, Tenn., where she focused mainly on consumer bankruptcy compliance for bank and nonbank mortgage-servicers.

Ms. Archer currently works on pro bono and pro se assistance initiatives for consumer debtors, as well as impact litigation initiatives for student loan dischargeability. She received her J.D. from Boston College Law School.

Christopher L. Hawkins is a partner in the Birmingham, Ala., office of Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP. Throughout his 20-year career, he has counseled individuals and businesses in a wide variety of bankruptcy and insolvency-related matters. He regularly represents debtors and creditors in out-of-court business restructurings, chapter 11 bankruptcy cases, and bankruptcy-related litigation, but for the past decade he has devoted most of his practice to advising large financial institutions on bankruptcy compliance and bankruptcy-related regulatory matters. In addition, he has represented financial institutions in nationwide consumer bankruptcy litigation, regulatory enforcement matters and large-scale remediation projects, as well as through his time serving as interim in-house bankruptcy counsel for one of the largest financial institutions in the Fortune 100.

Over the years, Mr. Hawkins has counseled clients on a wide range of consumer bankruptcy engagements, including designing and conducting risk assessments, drafting policies and procedures, scoping and implementing bankruptcy remediation projects, preparing comments to regulators on proposed regulations impacting bankruptcy, training client bankruptcy departments, auditing third-party bankruptcy vendors and counseling clients on bankruptcy operational issues.

Mr. Hawkins received his B.S. summa cum laude in 1996 from Spring Hill College and his J.D. summa cum laude in 1999 from the University of Alabama School of Law, where he was a member of the Order of the Coif, served on the Alabama Law Review, received the M. Leigh Harrison Award and was a Hugo Black Scholar.