Las The functions of bankruptcy law: current trends in comparative law

Abstract

The financial crisis suffered by most of the industrialised have removed the foundations of bankruptcy law, especially as regards its elementary principles and functions. In this sense, the increase in the volume and complexity of business structures has had a notable impact on the recent reforms of bankruptcy law, which have tried to encourage the conservation function of bankruptcy proceedings. The current trend is to protect the company in difficulty by means of its sanitation or rehabilitation, but this laudable purpose cannot be unrelated to an economic-functional analysis of the bankruptcy solution applied.  The purpose of this article is to analyze the dynamics in the configuration of the function of bankruptcy law present in the recent legislative interventions carried out by some European and Latin American countries. In this respect, the work begins with a justification of the interpretative relevance of the function of bankruptcy law; in a successive and separate way, a historical review of the traditional functions of bankruptcy law is made, which serves as a precedent to expose the new dynamics in the configuration of the function of bankruptcy law; finally, these trends are analyzed from an economic-functional perspective, and we conclude with brief personal reflections.