I’ve always been a fan of Justice Robert Jackson’s writing. Judge Posner, of the Seventh Circuit, reminds me of such entertaining writing. I hope he accepts the next invitation to join the supreme bench.
In response to debtor’s argument that 707(a)’s grounds for dismissal are exclusive, Judge Posner rebuts by saying:
The fact that the three grounds in §707(a) are introduced by “including” tugs against the argument that they are exclusive, or that they exhaust the statute. If you tell your maid to iron your clothes, including your Bond Street tuxedo and its cummerbund, there is no implication that she is not to iron your other clothes.
Then Judge Posner addressed the debtor’s next argument that debtors cannot be expected to be homeless for the sake of paying their creditors. Judge Posner writes:
No one is asking them to live in a tent, dress in rags, drive a 1950 Chevy, or emulate Mme. Loisel in Guy de Maupassant’s short story “The Necklace” (“La Parure”) who loses a borrowed necklace that she believes to be very valuable and ruins herself and her husband financially in order to remunerate the owner, only to discover in the end that the necklace was a fake, made of glass and worth almost nothing. What the Schwartzes failed to do was pay as much of their indebtedness as they could without hardship. Their action was deliberate and selfish, and provides good cause for denying the discharge. The dismissal of their petition will place them under greater pressure to pay down their debts than if they’re permitted to persist in living high on the hog (relative to the average American family, which cannot afford to spend $11,100 a month on consumption) in the face of a considerable indebtedness.
See Opinion Here: https://mattlindblom.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/2015-08-24-in-re-schwartz.pdf