First Southern National Bank v. Sunnyslope Housing Ltd. Partnership

Today’s opinion claims to “take the Supreme Court at its word,” but it fetishizes a selection of the Court’s words at the expense of its logic. This cramped formalism produces a strange result: Even though the Court has told us that cram-down valuations are supposed to limit a secured creditor’s risk, we’ve adopted a new valuation standard that turns entirely on the debtor’s desires — creditors be damned. Instead of holding the valuation hostage to the debtor’s “particular use,” I would hold that the appropriate value is the market price of the building without restrictive covenants.1

The…