History

The National Bankruptcy Conference has worked with Congress on bankruptcy legislation since the Great Depression. Its history runs alongside the history of modern American bankruptcy law.

A nucleus at Congress’s request

The Conference began as a nucleus of the nation’s leading bankruptcy scholars and practitioners, who gathered informally in the 1930s, at the request of Congress, to help draft major Depression-era amendments to the bankruptcy law. Their work led to the Chandler Act of 1938, the first comprehensive revision of the Bankruptcy Act of 1898. What Congress wanted from them was particular: the consensus views of experts who brought a wide range of perspectives to bear on bankruptcy.

Formalized, and renewed

The group was formalized in the 1940s, and it has met regularly ever since. Over the decades it has renewed its membership from time to time with additional experts, and it has kept watch on how bankruptcy law operates in practice, not only on how it reads.

Building the modern Code

In the 1970s, members of the Conference formed the core of the Commission on the Bankruptcy Laws of the United States. The Commission’s 1973 proposal to overhaul the nation’s bankruptcy laws led to the enactment of the Bankruptcy Code in 1978, the Code that governs bankruptcy today. Among the Conference’s members have been former congressional staff who helped draft it; one, Richard Levin, was among its principal authors and has since testified before Congress on the Conference’s behalf.

A second generation of reform

Conferees were heavily involved in the work of the National Bankruptcy Review Commission, whose 1997 report began the process that led to significant amendments to the Code in 2005. As those amendments came before the Senate Judiciary Committee that year, the Conference put forward a proposal to protect employees, customers, and trade creditors in the early stages of a chapter 11 case.

Small business, and a new subchapter

Bankruptcy professionals had known for decades that chapter 11 did not work well for small business debtors. In 2009 the Conference formed a working group to find a better way to reorganize them. The Small Business Reorganization Act of 2019 incorporated, with a few modifications, the most important features of the Conference’s proposal, including a new subchapter V of chapter 11. The Conference has stood behind that work since, writing in 2022 in support of making the Act’s debt threshold permanent and testifying in 2025 on the need to raise it.

In a crisis

In March 2020, as the SARS-CoV-2 virus spread, the Conference wrote to the leaders of both houses of Congress urging that the bankruptcy system provide effective and efficient relief to the people and businesses it harmed. A month later it recommended that Congress reenact Section 108(i) of the Internal Revenue Code, first enacted during the Great Recession of 2009 to help restructure corporate obligations outside of bankruptcy.

The record

Through every era, the Conference’s posture toward Congress has stayed the same. Its public record, from a 1988 statement on amendments to chapter 9 to its letters of 2026, is gathered in the Conference’s archive, where each position can be read as it was issued.