Pursuant to Section 727 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, an individual Chapter 7 debtor may receive a discharge “from all debts that arose before the date of the order for relief under this chapter.” A Chapter 11 or Chapter 13 debtor may receive similar relief pursuant to Sections 1141 and 1328(b), respectively. Under any chapter, this discharge serves the Bankruptcy Code’s principal goal of relieving a debtor from his or her prepetition obligations and providing the debtor with a “fresh start” on emergence from bankruptcy. Notwithstanding this goal, a bankruptcy discharge is not all-encompassing: it is limited by Section 523(a), which expressly excepts particular debts from the scope of the debtor’s discharge. Among other categories, the list of nondischargeable debts includes debts arising from certain tax or customs duties, money or property to the extent obtained by fraud, domestic support obligations, and government fines or penalties. In addition, Section 523(a)(6) excepts from discharge a debt “for willful and malicious injury by the debtor to another entity.”
In In re Soliman, 539 B.R. 692 (Bankr. S.D.N.Y. 2015), the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York enforced the “willful and malicious injury” exception to discharge, but clarified that the underlying conduct giving rise to the debt required more than “merely a deliberate or intentional act that leads to injury.” Rather, for a debt to be deemed nondischargeable under Section 523(a)(6), that debt must have arisen from conduct on the part of the debtor by which the debtor intended to cause deliberate and intentional injury. In other words, when determining whether a debt is nondischargeable under Section 523(a)(6), a court will look not only to the debtor’s intent to act, but rather to the debtor’s intent to injure.
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