Bankruptcy Act 52 Stat. 883 (1938)
BANKRUPTCY ACT 52 Stat. 883 (1938)
The Bankruptcy Act of 1938, known as the Chandler Act, represented Congress's first comprehensive revision of the Bankruptcy Act of 1898. (See bankruptcy power.) Under the financial strain caused by the Depression, the nation needed supplementary bankruptcy legislation. In a series of measures from 1933 through 1937, Congress sought to foster rehabilitation and reorganization of financially distressed debtors' nonexempt assets. The measures covered individual workers, railroads, farmers, nonrailroad corporations, and municipalities. The Chandler Act both revised the basic bankruptcy provisions of the 1898 act and restructured and refined the Depression-era amendments. It segregated the rehabilitation and reorganization provisions into separate chapters, a structure adhered to in the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978. But the 1938 act neither sought nor achieved organic changes in bankruptcy law.
Theodore Eisenberg
(1986)
Bibliography
Warren, Charles 1935 Bankruptcy in United States History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.