I spent more years (22) studying and researching law and collecting degrees (BA, LLB, MA, LLM, PhD) than I did working (for the US Government as a diplomat) earning money. I rarely take clients for money; mostly I write law review articles and live on rent that people pay for a couple of flats I own in Switzerland and London.

I have no particular cross to bear, nor any policy to promote. I studied and wrote on legal history. The concept of bankruptcy goes back hundreds of years (and longer, if you accept the Biblical concept of grace every 7 years). If you want to see an early explanation of bankruptcy and discharge, look here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/28408591

A person who deliberately incurs debts and then tries to discharge them is a fraudster, and bankruptcy judges know how to deal with such persons if the facts can be proved. But credit card companies virtually force their cards (or used to) on students and other naive customers. They charge huge rates of interest, discounting the losses from nonpayers.

Then they sell off, for pennies in the dollar, pence in the pound, unpaid accounts to vicious speculators who then harass the debtor until they get 100 cents in the dollar, 100 pence in the pound.

My sister-in-law, in her late 70s and living in California, was conned into a cell phone contract by an AT&T salesman who forged her dead husband's signature on the contract. I convinced AT&T to forgive the cancellation charge, yet they sold off the contract to a shark/vulture who then harassed her until I intervened and told the firm that I'd caught them lying and would prosecute them to the end of time. They backed off: whether they trashed my sister-in-law's credit rating is immaterial since she doesn't need or want credit.

Everything is relative. As a consumer credit counselor (which I am not and never have been, but at least for the USA I think the National Consumer Law Center is magnificent) one has to be sympathetic to victims of predatory lenders.

The concept of discharge in bankruptcy -- on which I wrote what I think to be a seminal paper, published in England and favourably quoted by a specialist American professor a few years later -- relates to English commercial culture. The right to a "fresh start" may have been unique to Anglo-American law in relation to consumers, but it has been everywhere and for all time (well, since debtors ceased to be put in prison) a fact of commercial law even in Civil Law countries.

I don't need to defend it: I report on what the law is, if you don't like it, if you want debtors to be tortured until they die or pay or their relatives pay up, hey -- why not join a Mexican drug gang?

Or write to your MP: here in Britain Parliament is sovereign and can ordain that black is white and day is night. Or, like the Indiana legislature, that pi = 3.2 and not 3.1415926 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill

Let me say something in French which I quote from a story I read in grade school: Celui qui possède vit au dépens de celui qui travaille. Quiconque ne produit pas l'équivalent de ce qu'il consomme est un parasite social.

I looked that up on Google and JSTOR a few weeks ago, and found an explanation for it here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/26893275 After all, after 50+ years how could I remember where it came from?

Cheers