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In RadLAX Gateway Hotel, LLC v Amalgamated Bank, the Supreme Court’s statutory interpretation focuses on an emerging theme of its bankruptcy jurisprudence: the proper domain of the bankruptcy judge. While one might expect the Court to approach that question of domain as it has for administrative agencies, that is not the approach taken. This article explores the Court’s approach to bankruptcy’s domain. In doing so, we connect three principal strands of the Court’s bankruptcy jurisprudence. The first strand, embodied in Butner v United States, centers on the idea that the bankruptcy forum must vindicate nonbankruptcy rights. The second, most recently addressed in Stern v Marshall, focuses on the limits of bankruptcy judges in deciding and issuing final judgment on the issues before them. Bankruptcy judges must limit themselves to deciding issues central to the administration of the bankruptcy process. RadLAX is the continuation of a third strand that makes it plain that the Court reads ambiguous provisions of the Bankruptcy Code to narrow the range of decisions over which the bankruptcy judge may exercise her discretion — at least when the exercise of that discretion might impact nonbankruptcy rights. The resulting bankruptcy jurisprudence is in stark contrast with the Court’s approach in administrative law. This paper attempts to make sense of this state of affairs and connect it with the realities of bankruptcy practice today.

Section 1129(b) of the Bankruptcy Code gives each class of unsecured claims the right to insist that a reorganization plan be "fair and equitable" and to prevent those junior to them from receiving "property" on account of their old interests. The Bankruptcy Code is often said to embrace a rule of absolute priority, but if it does so, it is only through these restrictions. Hence, the meaning of the words "fair and equitable" and "property" is the terrain on which priority battles are contested. One must choose among different methods of statutory interpretation. One can derive priority rules by examining the judicial evolution of the words "fair and equitable" before they were incorporated into the 1978 Bankruptcy Reform Act. Alternatively, one can look to the word "property," and derive priority rules by trying to define this word. Opinions in the most recent Supreme Court case on this issue, 203 N. LaSalle, exemplify these competing approaches. Using these opinions as its starting point, this paper explores the way in which priority rules in bankruptcy have evolved over time and shows how the absolute priority rule is harder to derive from the statute and hence more contingent, positively and normatively, than commonly supposed.