Concurrent Jurisdiction of State and Bankruptcy Courts

There is a nice little Kentucky Supreme Court opinion called Howard v Howard, 336 S.W.3d 433 (Ky. 2011) every Kentucky family lawyer and consumer bankruptcy lawyer should read. The first part of the opinion addresses child support and contempt sanctions, which to be sure are fun things to know about, but the meat of the opinion spells out the concurrent jurisdiction of Kentucky Courts with the Federal Bankruptcy Courts and how that effects discharge of certain kinds of debt.

Under 28 U.S.C. Sect. 1334(b), a state court has the same and concurrent jurisdiction as a bankruptcy court to make a determination as to whether a particular debt is discharged by a bankruptcy. In the Howard case, the ex-husband had agreed to be responsible for certain debts the ex-wife had also co-signed. However, he went into a Chapter 7 and received a discharge of that debt. Even though the ex-wife had notice of the bankruptcy and did NOT file any objection in the Chapter 7, she was still able to go to the Kentucky Circuit Court where the divorce had occurred and get a ruling that ex-husband still owed the obligation to her.

You see, the divorce decree created an obligation between the ex-husband and ex-wife even though a third party was the direct creditor. This obligation was found to be an 11 U.S.C. Sect. 523(a)(15) obligation as a result of a divorce. Therefore, by operation of that law, that obligation to the ex-wife was not touched by the bankruptcy. When the original creditor came back to collect from the ex-wife, she was able to pursue contempt against the ex-husband and win. This saved ex-wife from having to pay for a lawyer in the bankruptcy in addition to paying for a lawyer in the Circuit Court case.

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