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Twenty-five years ago, the Fifth Circuit appointed a
former Lutheran minister who had been licensed a scant seven years to the
bankruptcy bench in San Antonio. With the retirement of Judge Leif M. Clark on
October 20, 2012, another long-serving Western District judge has moved on to a
new stage of life. While Judge Clark may be departing the bench, he leaves
practitioners with a body of work which can be characterized as thoughtful,
controversial and occasionally irreverent but never dull.
To do justice to Judge Clark would require me to quit my
job and write for at least a year. Since I have a family to feed, I will focus
on just a few highlights here. I am sure that others can add to what I have
written and I encourage

Clawback actions in Ponzi scheme cases may be a dime a
dozen these days, but the issues now raised by the Supreme Court decision in Stern v. Marshall, __ U.S. __, 131 S. Ct.
2594 (2011), can become quite costly for those involved.  In Stern
v. Marshall, the Supreme Court held that bankruptcy judges do not have the
constitutional authority "to enter a final judgment on a state law counterclaim
that is not resolved in the process of ruling on a creditor's proof of claim,"
even though Congress designated it as a core claim in 28 U.S.C. § 157(b)(2)(C).
Id. at 2620.
Whether you are representing the trustee plaintiff or a
clawback defendant, the issue commands immediate attention

Detroit
has seen signs
of revival in its urban core following the near-death experiences of GM and
Chrysler. Unfortunately, its municipal finances remain beaten down by the
city's long and precipitous decline over the past several decades. Labor
and legacy costs, incurred when the auto industry thrived and the population
well exceeded a million citizens, are now heavy shackles on a city whose
population has dropped to 700,000. Those costs, combined with a
dysfunctional municipal government that has been unable to make necessary

WASHINGTON, D.C. - (Mealey's) The U.S. Supreme Court
today declined to hear arguments in a case in which a company that had
purchased a debtor's trademarks at an asset sale argued that those trademarks
were being infringed upon by a third party that continued selling products
under the debtor's name (Sunbeam Products Inc. v. Chicago American
Manufacturing LLC, No. 12-431, U.S. Sup.).
Bankruptcy
In 2009, creditors of Lakewood Engineering &
Manufacturing Co. (LEM) filed an involuntary bankruptcy against the company in
the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Illinois.
LEM, which made and sold a variety of consumer products,