In their series on how the effects of slavery remain with us today, Reuters spoke to Professor Robert Lawless about the history of bankruptcy. The series, titled “Slavery’s Descendants” examines how slavery, the Jim Crow era, and racial discrimination put two different families (one white, one black) on very different economic paths. For part four, “American Dreams,” Lawless provides his expertise to explain racial discrepancies in bankruptcy cases, which have tended to have worse outcomes for Black debtors than for white debtors.
