Consumer Bankruptcy, Sociology Of

Consumer bankruptcy is a term used for a court proceeding with the purpose of granting an individual a discharge of all or part of his or her prebankruptcy debt. Consumer bankruptcy has been the topic of a considerable amount of sociolegal work, especially in the United States, and the impact of this work goes in many respects far beyond the bankruptcy field. The growing overall number of consumer bankruptcies, 1.5 million in 2003, and increasing amount of debt that is written off in consumer bankruptcies in the United States alone has made the topic politically heated, and therefore the sociolegal studies on consumer bankruptcy are often referred to in political controversies over law reform.