Mission
The Open Bankruptcy Project builds free, open-source tools that screen federal bankruptcy cases for statutory compliance failures. We make public court data accessible and understandable to the people it affects most -- debtors, advocates, researchers, and policymakers.
Every tool we build is free. Every dataset we produce is open. We accept no attorney referral fees, run no advertising, and harvest no user data. Our work is funded entirely by public donations.
History
Methodology
Our screening tools analyze the Federal Judicial Center's Integrated Database, which contains filing-level records for all federal bankruptcy cases. We cross-reference prior filing histories against statutory discharge bars in Sections 1328(f), 727(a)(8), and 109(g) of the Bankruptcy Code.
The methodology identifies cases where a debtor's prior filing history would trigger a statutory bar that was not flagged at the point of case initiation. This analysis has been reviewed by faculty at UC Berkeley School of Law and forms the empirical basis for Suggestion 26-BK-3.
Full methodological details are available on our Research page.
Board of Directors
Governance
The Open Bankruptcy Project is organized as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation (determination pending). Our articles of incorporation include an unamendable anti-acquisition clause: the organization cannot be sold, merged, or acquired under any circumstances.
We maintain strict independence from attorney advertising, legal referral services, and commercial legal technology companies. We do not accept funding that would create conflicts of interest with our mission of public transparency.