Telfer on Canada's First Superintendent of Bankruptcy

Thomas G. W. Telfer, Western Law, has posted an installment of his book in progress on Canadian bankruptcy law during the Great Depression as The New Bankruptcy "Detective Agency"? The Origins of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy in Great Depression Canada. It also appears in Canadian Business Law Journal 64 (2020): 22.  Here is the abstract:

In the depths of the Great Depression, R.B. Bennett’s Conservative government appointed W.J. Reilley as Canada’s first Superintendent of Bankruptcy. Reilley’s experience made him eminently qualified. He had trained as a lawyer and had been the Registrar of the Bankruptcy Court of Ontario at Osgoode Hall for many years. The creation of the federal Superintendent’s office in 1932 is one of the major milestones in the legislative history of Canadian bankruptcy law. In the bankruptcy law literature, there is a broad recognition that the 1932 reforms were vital. These accounts are incomplete. This article seeks to provide a fuller understanding of these reforms by examining sources of opposition to the establishment of the Superintendent’s office. Not all accepted the new regulatory approach and the prospects of a bankruptcy bureaucracy during the Depression. Within months of Reilley taking office, critics called into question his qualifications and demanded his resignation. Little is known about the 1932 reforms as the creation of the Superintendent’s office has largely been overshadowed in the insolvency field by the enactment of corporate reorganization legislation in 1933 and farm credit legislation in 1934

Dan Ernst

Pardo on Bankruptcy and Slavery in New Orleans

Rafael I. Pardo, Emory University School of Law, has posted On Bankruptcy’s Promethean Gap: Building Enslaving Capacity into the Antebellum Administrative State, which is forthcoming in the Fordham Urban Law Journal:

As the United States contends with the economic crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, federal bankruptcy law is one tool that can be used to resolve the financial distress suffered by individuals and businesses. When implementing this remedy, the question arises whether the law’s application should be viewed as limited to addressing private debt matters, without regard for the public interest. This Article answers the question by looking to modern U.S. bankruptcy law’s first forebear, the 1841 Bankruptcy Act, which Congress enacted in response to the depressed economic conditions following the Panic of 1837. That legislation created a judicially administered system that nationalized bankrupts’ assets, some of which featured prominently in the business of slavery. This Article focuses on a specific episode from New Orleans, which at the time was the nation’s third-most-populous city, had the nation’s largest slave market, and had one of the nation’s largest money markets. One of the bankruptcy cases commenced in that city involved the administration and sale of Banks Arcade, which was a premier commercial exchange for auctioning enslaved Black Americans. This history about how the federal administrative state restructured one component of the U.S. slavery complex should prompt critical reflection on how present-day bankruptcy law manages the fallout from a financial crisis. This Article concludes that courts have the authority to permit the public to advocate for its interests in distressed assets redeployed through the federal bankruptcy system.

–Dan Ernst

Anne Fleming: A Canadian Business Law Tribute

Anne Fleming was to present a paper based on her research on Birmingham, Alabama’s innovative bankruptcy court at 100 Years of Canadian Bankruptcy and Insolvency Law, a conference that was to be held last May and now is to be held next May.  The conference papers are to be published in a special volume of the Canadian Business Law Journal, edited by the two conference organizers, Thomas G.W. Telfer and Alfonso Nocilla.  The two have announced that they have decided to dedicate the volume to Anne Fleming and have added the following to its foreword.

We would like to acknowledge that one of our conference panelists, Professor Anne Fleming of Georgetown University Law Center, passed away earlier this year. Anne was scheduled to present "The Origins of the American Consumer Bankruptcy System" during our first panel on Historical Perspectives on Insolvency Law. At the time of her passing Anne was engaged in a new book project: Household Borrowing and Bankruptcy in Jim Crow America, 1920-1960. Her preliminary findings can be found on her website: The Bankruptcy Capital of the World: Debt Relief in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1930s.  We dedicate this special volume of the Canadian Business Law Journal to Anne Fleming.

--Dan Ernst

Kadens on Twyne's Case

Take it from me, folks: the research underpinning this transporting case study of debt in early modern England is astonishing.  Emily Kadens, Northwestern University School of Law, has posted New Light on Twyne's Case, which appears in American Bankruptcy Law Journal 94 (2020): 1-84:

Edward Coke (NYPL)

Twyne's Case, a 1602 English Star Chamber decision, is one of the most durable decisions of the American common law tradition. The case famously concerns fraudulent conveyance, which occurs when a debtor transfers some or all of his assets to a third party with the intent to "hinder, delay, or defraud" the debtor’s creditors. The case continues to provide judges with a test to evaluate when a transfer, even one made for good consideration, was done with the intent to defraud.

The opinion, as reported by Edward Coke, is still regularly cited in US courts. However, it turns out that the the facts that Coke reported, and the embellishments that have grown up around it, are not accurate. (Teaser: the case was not about sheep.) This article uses previously unknown trial documents to retell the complex and surprising story behind Twyne's Case. In so doing, it also opens for further study the role, within the larger premodern credit economy, of transfers of title without transfers of possession—conveyances that have, since 1571, often been declared fraudulent.

--Dan Ernst

Torrie's "Reinventing Bankruptcy Law"

Virginia Torrie, University of Manitoba Faculty of Law, has published Reinventing Bankruptcy Law: A History of the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (University of Toronto Press).  An interview with Professor Torrie is here.

Reinventing Bankruptcy Law explodes conventional wisdom about the history of the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act and in its place offers the first historical account of Canada’s premier corporate restructuring statute. The book adopts a novel research approach that combines legal history, socio-legal theory, ideas from political science, and doctrinal legal analysis. Meticulously researched and multi-disciplinary, Reinventing Bankruptcy Law provides a comprehensive and concise history of CCAA law over the course of the twentieth century, framing developments within broader changes in Canadian institutions including federalism, judicial review, and statutory interpretation.

Examining the influence of private parties and commercial practices on lawmaking, Virginia Torrie argues that CCAA law was shaped by the commercial needs of powerful creditors to restructure corporate borrowers, providing a compelling thesis about the dynamics of legal change in the context of corporate restructuring. Torrie exposes the errors in recent case law to devastating effect and argues that courts and the legislature have switched roles – leading to the conclusion that contemporary CCAA courts function like a modern day Court of Chancery. This book is essential reading for the Canadian insolvency community as well as those interested in Canadian institutions, legal history, and the dynamics of change.

–Dan Ernst

Perelman on the Bankruptcy History of the United States

Mark Perelman, whom I believe is a graduate of the Yale School of Management, has posted A Bankruptcy History of the United States:

Financial crises destroy value and radicalize the political sphere. Are these events random, idiosyncratic, or driven by some force? The ex-post answers — be they monetary, criminal, or international contagion — have a profound impact on the role of government in society, but have questionable predictive power. In the United States, only the Federal government can impair contracts across States through the bankruptcy process. The history of bankruptcy law is intertwined with that of crises and banking law, and, as we argue, is a consistent cause, accelerant, and reaction of financial crises.

--Dan Ernst

Pardo on Bankruptcy, Race & Citizenship in Antebellum US

Rafael I. Pardo, Emory University School of Law, has posted Financial Freedom Suits: Bankruptcy, Race, and Citizenship in Antebellum America, which is forthcoming in the Arizona Law Review:

This Article presents a new frame of reference for thinking about how the federal government facilitated citizenship claims by free people of color in the antebellum United States. While scholars have accounted for various ways in which free black litigants may have made such claims, they have not considered how the Bankruptcy Act of 1841 enabled overindebted free people of color to reconstruct their economic lives, thereby restoring the financial freedom that was and continues to be an essential component of American citizenship. Relying on a variety of primary sources, including manuscript court records, this Article shows how six free men of color in the Eastern District of Louisiana leveraged the economic benefit provided by the 1841 Act to reintegrate into their commercial communities and thereby protect their claims to citizenship.

--Dan Ernst

CFP: 100 Years of Canadian Bankruptcy and Insolvency Law

[We have the following conference announcement and call for papers.]

Western University Faculty of Law in London, ON Canada will be hosting the 100 Years of Canadian Bankruptcy and Insolvency Law Conference on May 22-23, 2020.  The conference will commemorate the 100th anniversary of the coming into force of the Bankruptcy Act, 1919, the basis of Canada's modern bankruptcy regime.

The conference organizers welcome papers that offer legal history perspectives on the evolution of bankruptcy law in Canada and other jurisdictions. Other topics are covered in the Call for Papers. Proposals are due June 24, 2019.

Thomas Telfer, Western University (ttelfer@uwo.ca).

Pardo on Federally Funded Slaving

Rafael I. Pardo, Emory University School of Law, has posted Federally Funded Slaving:

This Article presents a new frame of reference for thinking about the federal government’s complicity in supporting the domestic slave trade in the antebellum United States. While scholars have accounted for several methods of such support, they have failed to consider how federal bankruptcy legislation during the 1840s functionally created a system of direct financial grants to slave traders in the form of debt discharges. Relying on a variety of primary sources, including manuscript court records that have not been systematically analyzed by any published scholarship, this Article shows how the Bankruptcy Act of 1841 enabled severely indebted slave traders to reconstruct their financial lives and thus return to the business of enslaving black men, women, and children. Knowing this legal history gives us a richer understanding of the federalization of American slavery and its role in the development of the nation’s economy.

Weekend Roundup

• Here's an op-ed we missed last week, from USA Today: Amanda Tyler (Berkeley Law) on the Trump travel ban and the lessons to be drawn from Japanese American internment.

• UPDATE: Here's another one from USA Today: Christopher W. Schmidt (Chicago-Kent/American Bar Foundation) on "what Trump-era protestors can learn from the lunch-counter sit-ins of 1960."

• From Process, the blog of the OAH: Gabriel Loiacono (University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh) on "Using Poor Laws to Regulate Race in Providence in the 1820s." (h/t @hidehirota)

• A Mankato, MN, law firm, Farrish Johnson, marks the 125th anniversary or its founding with a series of historical posts on its website.   

• John Oliver, president of the Historical Society of Hartsville, Tenn., on Andrew Jackson as a young lawyer.

• A new issue of Common-place is out. It includes Katherine Gaudet (University of New Hampshire) on "how American society handles the collateral damage of capitalism," as manifested by bankruptcy law in an eighteenth-century novel.

• Those who follow the Frank May detective series, by Lawrence Friedman (Stanford University), will be pleased to know that a new installment is now out: The Body in the Yard (Quid Pro Books).
• There's also a new mystery series set in 1920s Bombay featuring Perveen Mistry, a female Parsi lawyer. Sujata Massey's The Widows of Malabar Hill has plenty of legal historical plot twists.
• Also on South Asia, a recent blogpost by Kalyani Ramnath, Princeton University traces legal histories across the Bay of Bengal at the Archives of Economic Life in South Asia blog.

• Here’s a recording of Tyler Stovall, UC Santa Cruz, deliver his Presidential Address at the 132nd Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, “White Freedom and the Lady of Liberty.”

• The National History Center’s next Congressional briefing is on the history of the Higher Education Act.  It will be held on Friday, February 16, 2018 from 11:30 am-12:30 pm in Rayburn House Office Building, Room 2060.

• The deadline for the 2018 Summer Institute on Conducting Archival Research of the History and Public Policy Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington has been extended to Sunday, February 18, 2018.

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Pardo on Bankrupt Slaves

Rafael I. Pardo, Emory University School of Law, has posted Bankrupt Slaves, which is forthcoming in the Vanderbilt Law Review 71 (2018):

Responsible societies reckon with the pernicious and ugly chapters in their histories. Wherever we look around, there exist ever-present reminders of how we failed as a society in permitting the enslavement of millions of black men, women, and children in the first centuries of this nation’s history. No corner of society remains unstained. As such, it is incumbent on institutions to confront their involvement in this horrific past so as to fully comprehend the kaleidoscopic nature of institutional complicity in legitimating and entrenching slavery. Only by doing so can we properly continue the march of progress, finding ways to improve society, not letting the errors of our way define us, yet at the same time never forgetting them.

This Article represents a contribution toward this progress, by telling what has been, until now, an untold story about institutional complicity in antebellum slavery—that is, the story of how the federal government in the 1840s became the owner of hundreds, if not thousands, of slaves belonging to financially distressed slaveowners who sought forgiveness of debt through the federal bankruptcy process. Relying on archival court records that have not been systematically analyzed by any published scholarship, this Article tells the story of how the Bankruptcy Act of 1841 and the domestic slave trade inevitably collided to create the bankruptcy slave trade, focusing on a case study of the Eastern District of Louisiana, home to New Orleans, which was antebellum America’s largest slave market. Knowing the story of bankrupt slaves is a crucial step toward recognizing how yet another aspect of our legal system—one that has brought in its modern incarnation financial relief to millions upon millions of debtors—had deep roots in antebellum slavery.

Weekend Roundup

• Canadian legal historians are justifiably proud of Philip Girard for his beautifully crafted and insightful plenary address at last week's meeting of the ASLH. 

Philip Girard (credit)

• Writing for JOTWELL's Administrative Law Section, Linda Jellum has posted an appreciative review of Nicholas Parrillo's Against the Profit Motive. 

• From Slate's The Vault: Edgar Allen Poe's 1842 bankruptcy petition.

• The Library of Congress's "Magna Carta: Muse and Mentor" exhibition is now open.  Another report, featuring the Law Library of Congress's extraordinary curator of rare books, Nathan Dorn.  And also Princess Anne.

• The Junto's Jessica Parr on creating a public history program. 

• The online edition of the Savannah Morning News has recently carried an interview of Jonathan Bryant, Georgia Southern University, about his forthcoming book Dark Places of the Earth: The Voyage of the Slave Ship Antelope, to be published next summer by W.W. Norton & Company.  Professor Bryant is to deliver the Harvest Lecture at Savannah's Davenport House Museum on Monday, November 17.

• Over at Inside Higher Ed, Ph.D. candidate Emily VanBuren (Northwestern University) has posted some tips for making archival research more efficient.

• In the wake of the disclosure that the founder of the Mormon Church, Joseph Smith, had as many as 40 wives, the New York Times asked LHB guest blogger Sarah Barringer Gordon (University of Pennsylvania) to weigh in on the Church's efforts at transparency. (Hat tip: @PennHistory)

• From the Chronicle of Higher Education: How to finish a humanities dissertation in six years or less.

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers. 

New Release: Telfer's "Ruin and Redemption"

I’m very please to announce the publication of a project I’ve followed with interest, Ruin and Redemption: The Struggle for a Canadian Bankruptcy Law, 1867-1919 (University of Toronto Press, 2014), by Thomas G.W. Telfer, University of Western Ontario Law.  It appears in the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History’s book series.  Any legal historian looking to see how ideas, political calculation, and economic interests converge can learn from it.

Here is the University of Toronto Press’s description:

In 1880 the federal Parliament of Canada repealed the Insolvent Act of 1875, leaving debtor-creditor matters to be regulated by the provinces. Almost forty years later, Parliament finally passed new bankruptcy legislation, recognizing that what was once considered a moral evil had become a commercial necessity. In Ruin and Redemption, Thomas GW Telfer analyses the ideas, interests, and institutions that shaped the evolution of Canadian bankruptcy law in this era. Examining the vigorous public debates over the idea of bankruptcy, Telfer argues that the law was shaped by conflict over the morality of release from debts and by the divergence of interests between local and distant creditors. Ruin and Redemption is the first full-length study of the origins of Canadian bankruptcy law, thus making it an important contribution to the study of Canada’s commercial law.

Here is the TOC:

Preface
Chapter 1: Ideas, Interests, and Institutions

PART I 1867–1880
Chapter 2: The Constitutional and Legislative History 1867-1880
Chapter 3: The Rise and Fall of Bankruptcy Law 1867-1880: The Equitable Distribution of Assets
Chapter 4: The Repeal of Bankruptcy Law 1867-1880: The Discharge
Chapter 5: The Role of Institutions 1867-1880

PART II 1880–1903
Chapter 6: Living With Repeal and the Failure of Federal Reform: 1880-1903
Chapter 7: The Constitutional Question and the Impact of Federalism: 1880-1903
Chapter 8: The Bankruptcy Law Debates: 1880-1903

PART III 1903–1919
Chapter 9: Reform Achieved: The Bankruptcy Act of 1919
Chapter 10: Conclusion

Here are some endorsements:

Thomas G. W. Telfer

“It is rare to find a work on commercial law that animates the law and its history by drawing insight from political debate, social context and commentary, economic analysis and literature, as well as legislation, case law, and parliamentary records. Ruin and Redemption is a valuable addition to the legal and historical literature on insolvency law.”

Tamara Buckwold, Faculty of Law, University of Alberta

“Ruin and Redemption is a significant contribution to the history of Canadian bankruptcy law. It demonstrates skilfully how ideas and interests, and the institutional structures which shaped them, contributed to Canada rejecting bankruptcy law in 1880 and not passing a national statute until 1919. Scholars from a variety of disciplines interested in comparative analysis of bankruptcy law development will benefit from reading this book.”
Iain Ramsay, Kent Law School, University of Kent

Murnane's "Bankruptcy in an Industrial Society"

Out from the University of Akron Press, at a price even a debtor can afford, is Bankruptcy in an Industrial Society: A History of the Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Ohio, by M. Susan Murnane, whose degrees include a Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University. The press rather tamely describes the book as

a social and institutional history of the Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Ohio. The work explains the development of the court and the story of the people who worked there and of those who sought refuge in the bankruptcy court, within the context of northern Ohio's changing economy. The story of this particular bankruptcy court also illustrates the historical evolution of bankruptcy as an American institution.

But as you can see from the blurbs, Bruce Mann and I think Bankruptcy in an Industrial Society is a lot more interesting than that.

M. Susan Murnane has written more than a history of a legal institution: her book is, as well, an institutional history of bankruptcy in United States. In full command of regional context and national trends, Murnane shows how, after Congress failed to anticipate the new forms of business risk and consumer debt of the twentieth-century economy, lawyers and judges did the job themselves by organizing professional associations, battling influence and corruption, and keeping national administrators of the federal courts responsive to the special needs of creditors and debtors. Readers will encounter rich detail, drawn from personal papers and government archives, concise statements of economic change, and clear explanations of the law and practice of bankruptcy. By revealing how much legal institutions mattered to industrialization and deindustrialization in northern Ohio, Murnane has written a model history of a court and a uniquely valuable account of a vital legal pillar of American capitalism.
—Daniel R. Ernst, author of Tocqueville’s Nightmare: The Administrative State Emerges in America, 1900–1940

Bankruptcy in an Industrial Society is more than the first comprehensive institutional history of one bankruptcy court. It is also a story of the rise and eventual decline of an industrial economy, told from the vantage point of a court that exists solely to sort through the failures that are the inevitable by-products of capitalist enterprise. Murnane combines the two skillfully and with great insight. Lawyers and historians everywhere—and not just in the northern district of Ohio—will be in her debt.
—Bruce H. Mann, author of Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence

Research Nineteenth-Century Belgian Bankrupts and Their Creditors!

H-Law has posted a job listing on the research staff of a project at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.  Quite apart from its value as a job announcement, the notice is interesting for the research it describes:

The candidate will conduct research within the framework of the FWO-funded research project “Bringing creditors to the negotiating table. Reconsidering the law on indebtedness and economic failure in early nineteenth-century Belgium (1808-1850)”. The project purports to analyse the negotiation strategies between failed/insolvent traders and their creditors, on the basis of archives of the commercial courts . .  .  .

More.

McKenzie on Helpless Groups (in Bankruptcy and Beyond)

Troy A. McKenzie, New York University School of Law, has posted “Helpless” Groups, which is forthcoming in the Fordham Law Review 81 (2013).  Here is the abstract:

William O. Douclas (LC)

This Essay confronts the idea of the “helpless” group — that is, the group comprising individuals who are thought to be incapable of protecting their own interests. That idea plays an important role in the history of the modern class action, which has been justified as a device providing redress for “small claims held by small people.” The rhetoric of helplessness did not begin with the class action. Instead, the concern about helpless individuals corralled into a group and preyed upon by their adversaries (and their own lawyers) originated in the world of business bankruptcy before it made its way to the world of the class action. The Essay traces the history of the helpless group in business bankruptcy cases and describes the influence of that history on the development of the modern class action. Bankruptcy, however, has shifted away from the perception that claimants are helpless to protect themselves in the process — a shift that explains the creation of committees and other forms of group representation in modern Chapter 11 practice. The Essay considers whether similar forms of group representation may serve a role in aggregate litigation outside the class action.

The National Bankruptcy Archives

[I don't believe we've ever noticed this important archive at the Biddle Law Library of the University of Pennsylvania Law School.]

In October 2000, the Biddle Law Library and the American College of Bankruptcy collaborated to create a special collection entitled the National Bankruptcy Archives (NBA), a national repository of materials relating to the history of debtor-creditor relations, bankruptcy and the reorganization of debt. The NBA collects records from the American College of Bankruptcy as well as from other organizations whose activities have been relevant to the history of bankruptcy and insolvency legislation, regulation, and administrative and judicial determination. The NBA also houses papers of individuals who have influenced the field, and other collections documenting the history of bankruptcy law.   [Among them, some files of Judge Edward Weinfeld.  DRE]

More.

Weekend Round-Up

• Fans of Barbara Babcock’s Woman Lawyer, a biography of Clara Foltz, can find the stops of her book tour this fall here.

• A thoughtful story about Daniel Sharfstein’s The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White appears in the on-line magazine Diverse: Issues in Higher Education. Sharfstein will appear at George Mason University’s annual fall book festival, September 18-23, and the Southern Festival of Books, October 14-16, in Nashville, Tennessee.

• The UK National Archives has expanded the license of the Anglo-American Legal Tradition (AALT) website at the University of Houston. Now available, free on line, are a variety of Privy Council materials, as well as documents on the Boston Tea Party, the boarding of the Ship Gaspee, the Stamp Act Riots, and the Seven Bishops Case in the King's Bench. Hat tip: H-Law.

• Congratulations to Emily Kadens, Texas Law, for winning the 2011 Editor’s Prize for The Pitkin Affair: A Study of Fraud in Early English Bankruptcy, which appeared in volume 84 of the American Bankruptcy Law Journal.  Bankruptcy lawyers, it seems, just loved it. See here and here.

• Better than Oprah?  George F. Will plugs David Bernstein's Rehabilitating Lochner here.

New Collection on Bankruptcy Reform in the 1930s

The University of Pennsylvania Biddle Law Library announces a new collection on Bankruptcy Reform in the 1930s: the Frances R. Kirkham Papers.

In the wake of the economic hardship brought on by the Great Depression, the United States was compelled to revisit its system of debt relief. Legislative efforts in the 1930s culminated in the passage of a new federal bankruptcy law, known as the Chandler Act of 1938, which established an administrative system that lasted for nearly 40 years.

Prior to the Chandler Act's passage, a young Supreme Court law clerk, Francis R. Kirkham, advised Chief Justice Evan Hughes and his associates on recommended changes to bankruptcy laws as they existed at the time. When writing the drafts of what would eventually become published as the "General Order and Rules of Bankruptcy," Kirkham researched the existing legislation, reports from the National Bankruptcy Conference (which, at this time, was the leading bankruptcy advocacy organization), and corresponded with his superiors at the Supreme Court. These and other materials from Kirkham's working files were recently processed as part of the National Bankruptcy Archives.

The finding aid of the Francis R. Kirkham Papers is located here.

Hat tip: Biddleblog

Kadens on Bankruptcy Fraud in 18th-Century England

Emily Kadens, University of Texas School of Law, has posted The Pitkin Affair: A Study of Fraud in Early English Bankruptcy, which was published in the American Bankruptcy Law Journal 84 (2010). Here is the abstract:

In 1705, two London merchants, Thomas Brerewood and Thomas Pitkin, attempted to pull off a massive bankruptcy fraud. Although the conspirators were quickly caught, unraveling the scam required three large insolvencies and four acts of Parliament over the course of more than forty years. Along the way, the Pitkin Affair and its aftereffects would test and expand the boundaries of then-existing bankruptcy law. This article presents the story of the Pitkin Affair as a parable to remind us that the current scandals with which we are confronted are not new. Neither are the reactions of the parties caught in the middle of the resulting financial catastrophe. Most lied; some cheated; and many could not let go of their sense of injustice and accept that their own misjudgment, and even greed, had also contributed to their losses.