Editor’s Note:  One of the many fascinating things about restructuring work is its willingness to evolve by borrowing from other areas of the law.  Just as business practices change, new financing techniques evolve, and transactions become more complex, the bankruptcy world must adapt as well, to allow for a well functioning insolvency system and not a stilted, out of date process.  To that end, we at The Bankruptcy Cave love finding curious decisions in tangential fields of the law, and thinking about how they may change bankruptcy practice, or how bankruptcy practice may change them (for instance, click here for a neat post last year about “Obamacare” and bankruptcy, or here for the most recent edition of

The latest in Stern analysis can be found in a fascinating story of mystery, money, and international intrigue. Last month, the Eleventh Circuit in In re Fisher Island Invs., Inc., No. 12-15595, 2015 WL 729689 (11th Cir. Feb. 20, 2015), upheld the bankruptcy court’s ruling as to the ownership of putative debtors, despite a party’s objection to the bankruptcy court’s constitutional authority to decide the putative debtors’ ownership under Stern v. Marshall.[1]

Fisher Island Investments is merely one part of the global litigation following the unexpected death of Arkadi Patarkatsishvili regarding the disputed ownership of three trusts—purportedly worth billions of dollars—between two competing groups: the Redmond Group and the Zeltser Group. Following litigation in the Republic of Georgia, the United Kingdom, Liechtenstein, the British territory in Gibraltar, and state litigation in the United States, a group of six entities (the “Petitioning Creditors”) filed three separate involuntary