Mission & Values

The National Bankruptcy Conference exists to advise Congress on the operation of bankruptcy and related laws, and on any proposed changes to those laws. That purpose has not changed since the Conference first came together, and everything we do follows from it.

Where we began

In the 1930s, as Congress took up major Depression-era amendments to the bankruptcy law, it turned to a group of the nation’s leading bankruptcy scholars and practitioners. They gathered informally, at Congress’s request, to help draft the amendments that became the Chandler Act of 1938. What Congress wanted was specific: the consensus views of experts who brought a wide range of perspectives to bear on bankruptcy. That group was formalized as the Conference in the 1940s, and it has met regularly ever since.

A hand in every era of reform

The Conference has been a resource to Congress on every significant piece of bankruptcy legislation since. Its members formed the core of the Commission on the Bankruptcy Laws of the United States, whose 1973 proposal to overhaul the nation’s bankruptcy laws led to the Bankruptcy Code of 1978. Conferees were heavily involved in the National Bankruptcy Review Commission, whose 1997 report began the process that produced significant amendments to the Code in 2005. And the Small Business Reorganization Act of 2019, which the Conference played a leading role in developing, incorporated, with a few modifications, the most important features of the Conference’s own small business reorganization proposal.

How a position is reached

What gives the Conference’s counsel its value is the way it is formed. We take substantive positions on bankruptcy law and policy, but never on behalf of any organization or interest group. Our members represent a broad spectrum of political and economic perspectives, and they work toward consensus, drawing on their knowledge and experience as practitioners, judges, and scholars. Every position is weighed against the stated goals of our bankruptcy system: debtor rehabilitation, equal treatment of similarly situated creditors, preservation of jobs, prevention of fraud and abuse, and economical insolvency administration.

Who we are

Membership is by invitation only. Our sixty active members include leading bankruptcy scholars at major law schools, current and former judges from across the country, and practitioners from leading firms across the country who have been involved in most of the major corporate reorganization cases of the last three decades. Among them are leading experts on consumer bankruptcy and on commercial, employment, pension, mass tort, and tax-related bankruptcy issues, as well as former congressional staff who helped draft the Bankruptcy Code in 1978.

What we offer Congress

Members of Congress, congressional committees, and their staffs can call on our Conferees as non-partisan technical advisors. We offer that help without regard to any substantive position the Conference may take, so a request never depends on agreeing with us. We are a voluntary, not-for-profit, self-supporting organization.

The work continues

The same mission shapes our work today. In July 2025, the Conference testified before Congress on the need to raise the debt limit for small businesses reorganizing under subchapter V. In November 2025, it proposed statutory changes to help individual chapter 7 debtors obtain competent counsel. And in 2026 it has written to Congress in support of the Bankruptcy Threshold Adjustment Act and urged an amendment to reverse the result of Bartenwerfer v. Buckley. Each is offered in the spirit of the work Congress first asked of us nearly a century ago: expert, non-partisan, and on the record.