Reinventing Bankruptcy Law explodes conventional wisdom about the history of the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act and in its place offers the first historical account of Canada’s premier corporate restructuring statute. The book adopts a novel research approach that combines legal history, socio-legal theory, ideas from political science, and doctrinal legal analysis. Meticulously researched and multi-disciplinary, Reinventing Bankruptcy Law provides a comprehensive and concise history of CCAA law over the course of the twentieth century, framing developments within broader changes in Canadian institutions including federalism, judicial review, and statutory interpretation. Examining the influence of private parties and commercial practices on lawmaking, Virginia Torrie argues that CCAA law was shaped by the commercial needs of powerful creditors to restructure corporate borrowers, providing a compelling thesis about the dynamics of legal change in the context of corporate restructuring. Torrie exposes the errors in recent case law to devastating effect and argues that courts and the legislature have switched roles – leading to the conclusion that contemporary CCAA courts function like a modern day Court of Chancery. This book is essential reading for the Canadian insolvency community as well as those interested in Canadian institutions, legal history, and the dynamics of change.

Consumer protection law in the age of globalisation poses new challenges for policy-makers. This book highlights the difficulties of framing regulatory responses to the problem of consumers' access to justice in the new international economy. The growth of international consumer transactions in the wake of technological change and the globalisation of markets suggests that governments can no longer develop consumer protection law in isolation from the international legal arena. Leading scholars consider the broader theme of access to justice from socio-legal, law and economics perspectives. Topics include standard form contracts, the legal challenges posed by mass infections (such as mad-cow disease and CJD), ombudsman schemes, class actions, alternative dispute resolution, consumer bankruptcy, conflict of laws, and cross-border transactions. This book demonstrates that advancing and achieving access to justice for consumers proves to be a challenging, and sometimes elusive, task.

All modern legal systems with advanced economies must address the question of how to respond to the needs of insolvent consumers whose burden of debt greatly exceeds their capacity to repay within a reasonable time frame. This study surveys comparatively the insolvency regimes currently in place or likely to be adopted in the foreseeable future in Canada,the United States, Australia, England and Wales, Scotland, Scandinavia and a representative group of Western countries on the continent of Europe. Modern legal systems have two basic alternatives in providing relief for over-committed consumers. The first, which involves restricting the enforcement of individual creditor remedies is a method with which this study is not concerned. Where the consumer is seriously insolvent and owes money to many creditors, a different approach is required -- a collective solution to debtor's problems – and this, the solution provided by modern insolvency systems, is the focus of this study.