Mark Tetzlaff has spent three years battling lawyers for the Department of Education over the right to have his student loans canceled in bankruptcy. On Thursday, he appealed his case to the Supreme Court, and if the nation's highest court takes the case on, it will be one of the rare occasions when it has addressed the $1.3 trillion pile of student debt held by 41 million Americans, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. Douglas Hallward-Driemeier and his team, Tetzlaff’s legal counsel, have asked the court to clarify 1970s-era rules that prevent borrowers from getting rid of education debt in bankruptcy, except in cases in which repaying it would constitute an “undue hardship.” Lawmakers never fully defined "undue hardship," leaving it to the courts to define these special, and rare, circumstances in individual cases. Tetzlaff has said that the standard being applied to his case is unconstitutional. Read more.
For more on student loans in bankruptcy, be sure to pick up a copy of ABI’s Graduating with Debt: Student Loans under the Bankruptcy Code.
