Wednesday, November 04, 2026

Srinivasan v. Milestone Financial LLC (9th Cir. - Nov. 4, 2026)

I'm glad that Judge de Alba comes out this way. While I'm sympathetic to people who find themselves in dire financial straits and need to file for bankruptcy, I'm ruthlessly unsympathetic to people who abuse the process. So while I agree with today's opinion that the text of the statute (and precedent) do indeed allow debtors the absolute right to dismiss their bankruptcy petition (as long as they do so timely), it thrills me that the Ninth Circuit simultaneously affirms the district court's decision to bar the appellants here from refiling another bankruptcy petition during the next year.

You can read the full opinion for more details about the particular procedural moves the debtors here employed, but this snippet from page 21 will at least give you a sense:

"Here, the bankruptcy court considered Appellants’ multiple bankruptcy filings, repeated failure to fully prosecute those petitions, and their conduct in the instant case, such as failing to submit necessary documents and failing to appear at hearings. One of the Appellants, though the record is unclear which one, has previously had a 180- day bar against them. Despite their significant history in bankruptcy court, both Appellants failed to appear at the hearing on the motion to bar them from filing. The Court infers that a lack of schedule filings and other documentation in their past bankruptcy cases is due to repeated bad faith filings. Moreover, the Appellants have been living rent/mortgage free in their home for multiple years during the pendency of these proceedings, and they only filed bankruptcy cases—the twelfth and thirteenth cases filed by the Srinivasan family—when the Appellee attempted to evict them from the home by foreclosure or other action. Based on this record, the bankruptcy court reasonably calibrated the refiling bar to Appellants’ specific history in bankruptcy court."

Oh yeah. Indeed, had I been the judge, they'd have been barred from refiling for much longer than a year.