Melissa B. Jacoby presents UNJUST DEBTS: How Our Bankruptcy System Makes America More Unequal, with Gene Nichol at Flyleaf Books

A groundbreaking look at the hidden role of bankruptcy in perpetuating inequality in America, from an expert in the field.

Bankruptcy is the busiest federal court in America. In theory, bankruptcy in America exists to cancel or restructure debts for people and companies that have way too many—a safety valve designed to provide a mechanism for restarting lives and businesses when things go wrong financially.

In this brilliant and paradigm-shifting book, legal scholar Melissa B. Jacoby shows how bankruptcy has also become an escape hatch for powerful individuals, corporations, and governments, contributing in unseen and poorly understood ways to race, gender, and class inequality in America. When cities go bankrupt, for example, police unions enjoy added leverage while police brutality victims are denied a seat at the negotiating table; the system is more forgiving of civil rights abuses than of the parking tickets disproportionately distributed in African American neighborhoods. Across a broad range of crucial issues, Unjust Debts reveals the hidden mechanisms by which bankruptcy impacts everything from sexual harassment to health care, police violence to employment discrimination, and the opioid crisis to gun violence.

In the tradition of Matthew Desmond’s groundbreaking Evicted, Unjust Debts is a riveting and original work of accessible scholarship with huge implications for ordinary people and will set the terms of debate for this vital subject.

Melissa B. Jacoby is the Graham Kenan Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A frequent commentator on bankruptcy and debt in national media outlets, she has published over fifty articles, book chapters, and op-eds. She lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Brooklyn, New York. Unjust Debts: How Our Bankruptcy System Makes America More Unequal (The New Press) is her first book. Find her at mbjacoby.org.

Gene R. Nichol is a law professor, commentator, and author of Indecent Assembly: The North Carolina Legislature’s Blueprint for the War on Democracy and Equality (Blair) and The Faces of Poverty in North Carolina: Stories from Our Invisible Citizens. He was director of the UNC Poverty Center until it was closed by the UNC Board of Governors for publishing articles critical of the then governor and General Assembly. Since 2015, his research has been supported by the North Carolina Poverty Research Fund.