Using original text, select cases of salience, and lots of real-world problems, this book lends itself to a variety of different teaching styles and approaches. While consistently raising questions of underlying objective and policy, the book deliberately avoids adopting any particular "philosophy" of bankruptcy, leaving the instructor to supply his or her own normative gloss, or just leave it to the students. There is complete coverage of key bankruptcy issues, such as property of the estate, claims, discharge, automatic stay, as well all other basic concepts of bankruptcy law.

Together, the four co-authors have taught bankruptcy courses at more than 20 very different law schools; one of them sat as a bankruptcy judge for nine years; and all four have substantial practice experience. Drawing on their diverse experience, they have prepared this book with three goals in mind: (1) introduce students to one new bankruptcy concept at a time, (2) show students the connection among the various concepts and (3) give the students a sense of how these bankruptcy concepts are utilized in both the smallest personal and largest business bankruptcy cases. They attempt to accomplish this through a style that is relaxed and conversational to keep student interest and attention.

New cases and problems have been added in the Fifth Edition, but the organizational style of the Fourth Edition is retained, which is lay out the core principles of bankruptcy law as they relate to all cases, whether a small individual consumer case or a Fortune 500 company reorganization. This is followed by a separate consideration of the issues unique to, respectively, individual Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 cases, and then to issues arising in all business cases, both individual (sole proprietorship) and entity (corporate or LLC). This approach, different from the approach taken in many texts, is designed to eliminate the need for the instructor to choose between covering consumer or commercial bankruptcy and to proceed by emphasis on key principles and policies rather than a pedantic walk through one type of bankruptcy case after the other.

Also, for teachers wanting to spend time on basic, non-bankruptcy debtor-creditor law, Dave, Bruce, Steve, and Larry have prepared an entire chapter of materials on this topic. It covers everything from extra-judicial collection to judicial, statutory, and consensual liens, including a basic introduction to UCC Article 9. At the same time, the book is easily adaptable for use in a stand-alone, upper-level bankruptcy reorganization class.

The Fifth Edition is also timely. In addition to covering the latest Supreme Court cases and other developments in the field, the book also incorporates treatment of the Small Business Bankruptcy Reorganization Act of 2019 and the bankruptcy provisions of the The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act of 2020.

The supplemental e-materials not only have revised text and problems for use by your students but also revised teacher's notes so that you know what Epstein, Markell, Nickles, and Ponoroff had in mind when they wrote each and every problem. And, the e-materials have much more than new casebook and teachers manual pages, including:

• Collection of IRS materials
• One-click links directly to the Code, Rules, forms, tables of content for on-line bankruptcy treatises, and the UCC
• Links to useful Web sites
• Exhaustive, consolidated collection of searchable Westlaw databases relating to bankruptcy and commercial law
• Daily refreshed collection of recent cases and topical highlights about bankruptcy
• Forum for discussing anything and everything with the casebook authors and other bankruptcy teachers