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Abstract: The Supreme court doesn't often speak about the need for uniformity in bankruptcy, but this past term, in Siegel v. Fitzgerald, it issued an important decision on that front. The Court held that Congress's enactment of a fee increase that applied to debtors in all but two states violated the Bankruptcy Clause's uniformity requirement.
Like many Supreme Court cases, Siegel raises more questions than it answers. In the wake of the Court's decision, commentators identified several of these significant questions. What is the appropriate remedy for Congress's violation of the uniformity requirement? Since the disparate fee increase stemmed from the dual systems of United States trustees and bankruptcy administrators, do those dual systems themselves violate the uniformity requirement? More broadly: what does the Bankruptcy Clause actually require with respect to uniformity?
Although these questions are likely to spur much litigation and scholarly debate in the coming years, they are not the focus of this article. Instead, this article examines what the opinion did do - namely, provide some guidance on how uniformity works in bankruptcy. Prior to Siegel, you would be forgiven for thinking that the uniformity requirement did very little work in bankruptcy law. Siegel gives the uniformity requirement a bit more definition and, by teeing up additional questions surrounding that requirement and its meaning, the opinion allows the bankruptcy community to generate more case law - and hopefully, to obtain more clarity - on uniformity issues in the years to come.
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