In response to: Extending Bankruptcy Law to States: Is It Constitutional?
While a federal bankruptcy law for states might be a desirable policy, its constitutionality is doubtful. Now, I am not a constitutional lawyer and cannot speak to the details of United States case law, but I do study fiscal federalism in comparative context: its conditions, operations, and consequences. Accordingly, I will analyze how a federal law for state bankruptcy would tend either to support or to undermine the values one might seek to protect by means of the federal, constitutional order in the United States. The main points of the argument are as follows. First, federal bankruptcy law for cities reaches…
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In his illuminating and timely Liberty Forum essay on the constitutional impediments to a state-level bankruptcy procedure, Michael McConnell emphasizes the importance of the sovereignty of the states in the framework of American federalism. Unlike Detroit and San Bernardino, and perhaps unlike Puerto Rico, the states are considered fully sovereign with respect to taxation, expenditures,…
Michael McConnell’s Liberty Forum essay does an excellent job of outlining the legal case that enabling states to declare bankruptcy is not necessarily inconsistent with constitutional principles or with existing case law. From the perspective of a public choice economist, however, there is another salient issue. What those who study the outcomes of institutional arrangements and…