For bankruptcy nerds, writing about Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is a challenge when one is constrained by the precept that one should not speak ill of the dead. That should not be an issue, I submit, because Justice Scalia long advocated a minority view of the Bankruptcy Code that would have conferred inestimable benefit on consumer debtors.

Before he died this month after almost 30 years on the Court, Justice Scalia’s most notably positive contribution to bankruptcy law was his 1992 dissent in Dewsnup v. Timm. Only he and one other justice would have upheld a primary reform in the Bankruptcy Code by overruling the Bankruptcy Act’s notion that liens pass through chapter 7 unaffected.

Had Justice Scalia’s interpretation carried the day 24 years ago, tens of thousands of Americans could have kept their homes by stripping down undersecured mortgages in bankruptcy. The Great Recession would have inflicted less pain on citizens by putting the onus more on lenders that marketed defective mortgages.

If Justice Scalia’s word had been law, every mortgage default would not have become a bankruptcy because banks soon would have learned to cut down the amount of mortgages voluntarily, in the process keeping people in their homes and even enabling lenders to preserve some value lost in foreclosure.

Conversely, Justice Scalia’s arguably most damaging opinion for bankruptcy courts was Law v. Siegel, where he held for a unanimous Court in 2014 that someone who commits an egregious fraud can still retain an exempt homestead. Looking at it another way, though, his opinion is staunchly in the debtors’ camp.

For the previous 80 years, courts would often begin their opinions by remembering Local Loan Co. v. Hunt and saying that “courts of bankruptcy are essentially courts of equity, and their proceedings inherently proceedings in equity.”

Now, exemptions are sacrosanct, even in the face of compelling equitable arguments to the contrary. Similarly, everything else written into the Code must be reflexively enforced, no matter how the result strikes a reasonable mind. Perhaps that is how Justice Scalia saw the role of courts because, as he said in his Dewsnup dissent, “a bankruptcy law has little to do with natural justice.”

Law may be the first major step toward ending the role of bankruptcy courts as courts of equity, because the opinion compels bankruptcy judges to enforce someone’s notion of the statute’s plain meaning no matter how stupid the result.

While Justice Scalia may have limited the ability of courts to rely on their own values in deciding cases, it is perhaps on balance better for debtors that he advocated for a literal construction of the reforms inherent in the Bankruptcy Code, which, on balance, were pitched in favor of consumers.

[Monday, we will examine Justice Scalia’s views on Stern v. Marshall and Wellness International v. Sharif, and how his antipathy to Article I tribunals might have ended up benefiting the bankruptcy process.]

[The foregoing represents the opinions of the writer and does not reflect the views of the ABI.]