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Bankruptcy has been a fertile ground for the economic analysis of law. A significant portion of bankruptcy scholarship during the past fifteen years applies the basic assumptions of standard economic theory to the problems caused by financial distress. This scholarship begins with the premise that people make choices in a rational manner in order to maximize their individual utility. It applies this axiom to questions ranging from when do individuals file for bankruptcy to how bankruptcy laws affect firms' investment decisions. As it has in most other areas of law (especially private law), law and economics has both reshaped our understanding of extant bankruptcy law and generated numerous proposals for reform. As illustrated by this symposium, scholars studying the way people make decisions have demonstrated that decision making routinely departs from the ideal posited by standard economic analysis. In various …