A Fresh Start for Personal Bankruptcy Reform: The Need for Simplification and a Single Portal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article develops the case for simplification of personal bankruptcy, using a single consumer portal and incorporating a repayment requirement for those debtors with surplus income. It provides an overview of how the 2005 Bankruptcy Act fails to prevent abuse but burdens all filers with new paperwork and other new hurdles. The result is to reduce access to a discharge by increasing the cost of bankruptcy, while still allowing relief to better off debtors, especially those who plan ahead and can afford good legal advice. The article then turns to implementation issues for a simpler system, drawing upon the conditional discharge approach used in Australia and Canada. These issues include setting the repayment period and measuring surplus income. A simplification project should also provide straightforward rules on collateral retention and establish uniform federal bankruptcy exemptions. A simpler system involving a single portal is the most promising way to prevent abuse without reducing access to bankruptcy for those in desperate need of relief.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.019 | 0.044 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".