Here is the heart of it, at pages 6-7 sans footnotes:
"Applied to municipalities, the L&E scholars argue that bankruptcy process ought to enable the creditors to intervene in those Chapter 9 debtors’ customary, state-law-based, and locally-situated political decision-making in order to “to collect taxes to pay preexisting debt; to order reductions in expenditures; to sell municipal assets; and perhaps even to reorganize the boundaries of or to dissolve the debtor municipality”—in order to increase recoveries on the creditors’ debt claims as much as possible and, more generally, for the sake of economic efficiency and wealth maximization. Moreover, the L&E critics of municipal bankruptcy have recently taken a “turn to history” in an effort to buttress their prescriptions for a more muscular, creditor-centric municipal bankruptcy process; but in doing so they are asserting a forensic and factually flawed version of the story of the inception and early years of Chapter IX.
That creates the instant historiographical problem: how to find, understand, and then tell the story of the origin of municipal bankruptcy."
-Josiah Daniel
(c) 2025