Georgetown Law Alumni Magazine - Res Ipsa Loquitur
Spring/Summer 2009 - Online Volume 1
Feature Articles
The State of the Legal Profession
Bankruptcy: A View from the Bench
Hard to believe, but when Peter J. Walsh (L’63), judge of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, graduated from Georgetown Law in the early 1960s, there was no course in bankruptcy law. Hardly any of the major New York law firms had bankruptcy practices, he says — and when one of his first law firm clients got into financial trouble, there was not a single lawyer with bankruptcy expertise to be found in the city of Wilmington, Delaware.
“I was in practice for five years before I met a bankruptcy judge,” says Walsh, who now works with five others on a daily basis. Now, the city of Wilmington has about 100 bankruptcy lawyers. And good or bad, there’s plenty of work for them to do: Walsh witnessed bankruptcy filings that doubled in 2008 from the prior year.
Still, that doesn’t mean that students should necessarily rush to take bankruptcy law courses. Walsh cautions, of course, that students considering bankruptcy as a career choice should still like what they propose to do.
“I would encourage them to take a bankruptcy course and find out if it’s the kind of challenge they’re interested in,” he says, noting that the bankruptcy code is very complex. “I always considered it an intellectual challenge and so I think they ought to be exposed to it and decide whether it’s the kind of thing that they want.”
But despite the uptick in work, bankruptcy judges still face the problem that most judges are concerned with these days — namely, that judicial salaries as a whole have not kept pace with inflation and the financial crisis makes it that much harder for Congress to do something about it. The number of applications for law clerks is growing too. Walsh received maybe 25 or 30 applications when he first joined the bench 15 years ago; this past year, he saw over 100. And though he never got to take a bankruptcy class, Walsh still remembers what he calls probably the best course he ever had — the contracts course taught by Professor Walter “Doc” Jaeger. “His course was very entertaining … and to this day, when I’m writing opinions I quite often run across issues that I addressed in law school,” Walsh says. “I feel very, very comfortable handling contract issues.”
