News Story of the Day

Some changes in the law are better late than never.

In 1978, Congress passed the Bankruptcy Reform Act, which created Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. In short, Chapter 11 of the Federal Bankruptcy Code system was designed for those honest businesses who fell on hard times. It gave them a new day. The law allows a company to continue its day-to-day operations through the reorganization process and ultimately protects the business from the weight of its creditors.

In the past four decades, class action defendants, and their lawyers, have reaped the most benefits. The protections Congress intended have been morphed into the greatest legal shield for bad actors and negligent institutions. They have worn a clear path in their repeated sprint to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court. Most notably, they include: Purdue Pharma, Boy Scouts of America, USA Gymnastics, and the Catholic Church.

The women spent hours recounting painful memories to investigators with the Maryland Office of the Attorney General. They told of the priests who pulled them out of class at Archbishop Keough High School 50 years ago, then brutally raped and sexually assaulted them.

But when the attorney general’s office released its massive report on sex abuse in Baltimore’s Catholic archdiocese in April, the two women were shocked. Their stories were there on page 258, but a key detail was missing: the name of one of the men who they say raped them.

The report names more than 150 clergy and archdiocesan personnel accused of perpetrating or covering up abuse, with 15 names redacted. But this man’s name was not in the report. He was described only as “the Jesuit intern.”