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22 Newman, Falling from Grace, p. 105.

23 William Buckley Jr., “On Going Broke,” The Washington Times (July 2, 1999), p. A14.

Appendix

1 Teresa Sullivan, Elizabeth Warren, and Jay Lawrence Westbrook, As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). The study examined court records for 1,529 randomly chosen debtors filing in all the judicial districts of three states—Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Texas—in 1981.

2 Teresa Sullivan, Elizabeth Warren, and Jay Lawrence Westbrook, The Fragile Middle Class: Americans in Debt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). The study examined both court records and a one-page questionnaire for 2,400 randomly chosen families filing for bankruptcy in all the judicial districts of five states—California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Texas—in 1991.

3 Melissa Jacoby, Teresa Sullivan, and Elizabeth Warren, “Rethinking the Debates over Health Care Financing: Evidence from the Bankruptcy Courts,” New York University Law Review 76 (2001): 375. The study collected questionnaire data from a random sample of 1,455 families who filed for bankruptcy in eight federal judicial districts: the Northern District of California, the Northern District of Illinois, the Eastern District of Kentucky, the Southern District of Ohio, the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, the Middle District of Tennessee, the Northern District of Texas, and the Eastern District of Wisconsin in 1999.

4 Because one focus of the 2001 study was the relationship between home ownership and bankruptcy, the Northern District of Texas (Dallas) was chosen over the Western District, which included San Antonio. It was the belief of the researchers that the housing market of Dallas was more typical and provided a more accurate representation of an urban center. San Antonio’s housing market was considered atypical for two reasons: proximity to the Mexico border and the fact that San Antonio is home to three major military installations. Each debtor must file in the district where he or she is a resident (legally defined), but some districts have more than one office to accept filings. So, for example, if the debtor resides in the Northern District of Illinois, he or she can file in Chicago or Rockford, a suburb, although very few are filed in Rockford. The researchers sampled only in the big cities, which is where the overwhelming majority of bankruptcies are filed in four of the five districts. In the Central District of California, the researchers sampled only Los Angeles, but in that district a larger proportion of cases are also filed in outlying areas. As we note in the text, this may result in a bias toward larger cities and an underrepresentation of rural and small-town areas.

5 For a discussion of this phenomenon, see Teresa A. Sullivan, Elizabeth Warren, and Jay Lawrence Westbrook, “The Persistence of Local Legal Culture: Twenty Years of Evidence from the Bankruptcy Courts,” Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 17 (1994), reprinted in Charles J. Tabb, Bankruptcy Anthology (Westbury, NY: Foundation Press, 2002).

6 Mean bankruptcy filing rate per 1,000 adults, 1990-2000. SMR Research Corporation, The New Bankruptcy Epidemic: Forecasts, Causes, and Risk Control (Hackettstown, NJ, June 2001), pp. 181-187.

7 The 1970 occupational codes have been used in all of the preceding Consumer Bankruptcy Projects. They are also still widely in use as the last “pure” occupational codes used by the Census Bureau. They have been used in major studies such as the General Social Survey. Since the 1970 census, the Bureau has adopted sets of codes that incorporate industry as well as occupation, but several “walkovers” are available that permit correspondence from one set of codes to another.

INDEX

Added Worker Effect

Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic (de Graaf)

African Americans

Alimony

American Association of University Professors

American Bankers Association