Personal Insolvency in the 21st Century: A Comparative Analysis of the US and Europe, Iain Ramsay (Oxford, Hart Publishing, 2017), 224 pp., Price £55. ISBN 978‐1‐84946‐809‐1

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/iir.1289
• Author: Jan‐Ocko Heuer
• Published date: 01 December 2017
• Date: 01 December 2017

Book Review

Personal Insolvency in the 21st Century: A

Comparative Analysis of the US and Europe,

Iain Ramsay (Oxford, Hart Publishing, 2017),

224 pp., Price £55. ISBN 978-1-84946-809-1

Jan-Ocko Heuer*

Post-Doctoral Researcher, Department of Social Sciences, Humboldt University, Berlin

In the wake of the Great Recession, personal insolvency law has reached a water-

shed. While previously consumer over-indebtedness had been primarily dealt with

by national governments in line with their economic models and legal traditions,

the crisis painfully demonstrated the global significance of household debt for

economic growth and stability and led international organizations such as the

International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the G20 and the European

Commission to get more involved with consumer debt regulation. In practice, the

IMF –as part of the ‘troika’with the European Central Bank and the European

Commission –has been the most important actor in recent insolvency law reforms,

but the World Bank was the first influential organization to publish a ‘Report on

the Treatment of the Insolvency of Natural Persons’,

1

providing justifications for

debt relief for natural persons and reviewing the variety of existing approaches.

Although we are still far away from having an authoritative international script

for addressing individual insolvencies (as it is provided for corporate insolvencies

by the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL)

Legislative Guide),

2

we have entered a new era of personal insolvency law in which

new and powerful actors have begun the quest for international templates and

‘best practices’.

The book by Professor Iain Ramsay of Kent Law School, one of the authors

of the aforementioned World Bank Report and a leading scholar of comparative

consumer bankruptcy, may thus be read as a retrospect view on the first period

of consumer insolvency legislation that is now coming to an end. This period began

in the 1970s with the considerable growth of household debt and the concomitant

*E-mail: jan-ocko.heuer@hu-berlin.de

1. Jason Kilborn et al., Report on the Treatment of the Insolvency

of Natural Persons (World Bank, Insolvency and Creditor/

Debtor Regimes Task Force, 2014).

2. UNCITRAL Legislative Guide on Insolvency Law

(UNCITRAL, 2004).

Copyright © 2017 INSOL International and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd Int. Insolv. Rev., Vol. 26: 354–357 (2017)

Published online 24 August 2017 in Wiley Online Library

(wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/iir.1289