March 15, 2012
On Monday, March 12, 2012, nearly 1,000 bankruptcy judges,
professionals and law students gathered at Pier 60, Chelsea Piers,
in Manhattan to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the ABI’s annual
Hon. Conrad B. Duberstein Bankruptcy Moot Court Competition. A
fitting close to the three-day competition, the Gala Dinner
featured an award presentation by the Bankruptcy Judges for the
Southern District of New to retiring Chief Bankruptcy Judge Hon.
Arthur J. Gonzalez, recognizing his service to the Bankruptcy
Court.
Now the largest single-site appellate moot court competition, the
Duberstein Competition is sponsored by St. John’s School of Law and
the American Bankruptcy Institute (ABI). It is named for
distinguished St. John’s alumnus and former ABI Director, Chief
Judge Conrad B. Duberstein, who passed away in 2005 at the age of
90. Law students from the Law School’s
ABI Law Review and
Moot Court Honor Society volunteer to help organize and manage
the event.
A record 54 teams from 39 schools around the country participated
in this year’s competition. A team from the University of Texas
School of Law took first place and a $5000 prize, while teams from
Stetson University College of Law made an impressive showing by
placing second and tying for third with the team from the
University of Florida Fredric G. Levin College of Law. The second
and third place teams received $3000 and $1500, respectively. In
addition, the University of Florida team won a $1,000 award for the
Best Brief and Hunter Oliver, a student at the Baylor University
School of Law, won the $1,000 Best Oral Advocate award. All the
monetary prizes were provided through the generosity of The ABI
Endowment Fund.
Nearly 200 lawyers and judges ― including Bankruptcy Judges from
the New York area and around the nation― helped judge the
competition, which included eight rounds of arguments. The final
rounds were held at the Conrad Duberstein United States Bankruptcy
Courthouse in Brooklyn. The final round was judged by a panel of
distinguished federal jurists that included:
- Hon. Jeffrey S. Sutton, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth
Circuit
- Hon. Bernice B. Donald, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth
Circuit
- Hon. Carla E. Craig, Chief Judge of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court,
E.D.N.Y.
- Hon. Arthur J. Gonzalez, former Chief Judge of the U.S.
Bankruptcy Court, S.D.N.Y.
Each year, the competition problem focuses on two sophisticated
cutting edge issues of bankruptcy law. Past competitions addressed
environmental clean up costs, channeling injunctions in mass tort
cases, state sovereign immunity, the constitutionality of the
bankruptcy courts, religious entity bankruptcies and the
constitutionality of speech restrictions imposed on consumer
bankruptcy attorneys, to name just a few of the problem topics.
This year’s problem again raised two timely unresolved issues of
bankruptcy law: (1) whether an innocent trade vendor who supplies
post-petition to the debtor on a C.O.D. basis must return the
payments under section 549 if the debtor’s use of funds to pay the
vendor exceeds the scope of the cash collateral order; and (2)
whether the Supreme Court’s decision in Stern v. Marshall
deprives the bankruptcy court of the power to hear and determine
the section 549 action. The fact pattern can be accessed via the
2012 Competition website.