In 2020, Debra Jean Marchus filed an adversary proceeding in a North Dakota bankruptcy court, seeking to discharge about $38,000 in student-loan debt. After a trial, Bankruptcy Judge Shon Hastings wiped out the debt. As summarized in Judge Hastings’s decision, Ms. Marchus began her journey through higher education in 1975, forty-five years before she filed … Read more
Diane Ashline, a 47-year old single mother, worked for 20 years as a dental assistant. Hoping to increase her income, she took out student loans to get an undergraduate degree and a master’s degree from Kaplan University, a for-profit school. Unfortunately, these degrees did not help her financially. Ashline never defaulted on her student loans. … Read more
A common saying when I was young (in the last century) was the old adage that lawyers are people who wish to make a lot of money but are risk-averse. That observation certainly rang true when I went to law school in the 1970s. I graduated from the University of Texas School of Law with … Read more
Tamara Parvizi, age 51, sought to discharge $653,743 in student-loan debt in a Massachusetts bankruptcy court. That’s a lot of debt–just shy of two-thirds of a million dollars. For 15 years, Parvizi took out student loans to pursue several degrees, and she became fluent in at least four languages. Nevertheless, Parvizi never made a single … Read more
Is this the year of Jubilee? Is this the year that distressed student-loan debtors finally get to shake off mountainous debt in the bankruptcy courts? Maybe. This week, Senator Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, and Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, filed a bill that would allow college-loan debtors to discharge their federal student loans … Read more