My work on this project has proceeded for so long that the number of people to whom I owe gratitude is surely longer than I can name in this context. To mention just a few, I should start with the tireless work that Samuel Lemley did collecting and organizing the papers of the Justices and presenting them on the Web site. I would thank Loring Veenstra on the same account had he not also worked so hard on the project as to justify his status as a collaborator. Jennifer Wertkin and Marty Witt at the Columbia Law School Library also deserve special thanks for their indefatigable efforts to help me obtain the relevant papers from the Library of Congress. John Jacob, the archivist of the Lewis F. Powell Jr. Archives at the School of Law atWashington and Lee University, also deserves special thanks for his prompt responses to my numerous inquiries about the contents of those papers.

The work of collecting and organizing the papers would not have been possible without a generous grant from the Endowment for Education of the National Conference of Bankruptcy Judges. Their support of empirical research about bankruptcy is a remarkable testament to the oft-overlooked care and thoughtfulness with which bankruptcy judges operate the system that this book examines.

So many people have provided so much input at so many different times that I cannot possibly list them all. I should, though, single out Greg Dovel, Roy Englert, Richard Lazarus, Deborah Malamud, Tom Merrill, Henry Monaghan, Bob Rasmussen, Jim Rogers, and Gil Seinfeld.

Finally, any thanks I can offer to my family are wholly inadequate. They have tolerated my intermittent obsession and procrastination on this project for longer than I care to admit. The intellectual contributions of my spouse, Allison, to this project go far beyond any call of collegial or familial responsibility.