Christian Pereyda (’17) won first place in the American Bankruptcy Institute’s Eighth Annual Bankruptcy Law Student Writing Competition, a first-ever win for a University of Alabama School of Law student.
“His paper furnished a reasoned and independent contribution to the ongoing debate surrounding the standards for discharging student loans in bankruptcy,” Professor Gary Sullivan said. “As a deserving winner, Christian has represented himself and the law school well in a writing competition widely regarded as the pinnacle forum for scholarly contributions by law students in the bankruptcy field.”
Pereyda’s paper, “Is Undue Hardship an Undue Burden?: Examining the Policy of Presumptive Non-Dischargeability for Student Loans in Bankruptcy,” argues that federal student loans should continue to be presumptively non-dischargeable in bankruptcy for policy reasons, but that this presumption should not apply to private student debts.
“When you discharge a federal student loan in bankruptcy, for all intents and purposes, you’re reallocating that expense from the borrower to the taxpayer,” Pereyda said. “For private student loans, the taxpayer is not involved. It’s just the lender and the borrower, and I argue there’s no policy justification for treating private student loan debt any differently from other unsecured debts.”
Pereyda will receive a $2,000 cash prize, publication of his paper in the ABI Journal and a one-year ABI membership.
Pereyda is pleased he secured a win for the Law School. “It affirms that I made the right choice in coming here. It’s a testament to the education I’m receiving here and the education I’ve been fortunate to receive throughout my life,” Pereyda said.
He first became interested in bankruptcy while working as a summer associate at Rosen Harwood in Tuscaloosa, where he began researching bankruptcy and student loans, with the hope of writing a paper and publishing it in a journal. Now that he has achieved his goal, he is interested in pursuing a career as a bankruptcy attorney.
“It’s just interesting to see how our society chooses to deal with distressed financial situations,” he said. “It’s way better than debtors’ prisons.”