IN RE ELAINE M. COLE
(SC 20746)
Supreme Court of Connecticut
July 18, 2023
Robinson, C. J., and McDonald, D’Auria, Mullins, Ecker and Alexander, Js.
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Syllabus
Pursuant to statute (
In November, 2021, the debtor, C, filed a bankruptcy petition under chapter 7 of the United States Bankruptcy Code in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Connecticut, claiming, inter alia, a statutory (
- This court concluded, as a threshold matter, that the answer to the certified question was a matter of state, rather than federal, law for choice of law purposes:
Under the federal statute (
11 U.S.C. § 522 (b) (3) (A) ) specifying what property can be exempted from a debtor’s chapter 7 bankruptcy estate, a debtor may protect “any property that is exempt under . . . State or local law that is applicable on the date of the filing of the petition,” and, accordingly, this court clarified that the question presented by this appeal was whether the expanded homestead exemption contained in P.A. 21-161 was applicable to C’s case, given that the expanded exemption was in effect when her bankruptcy petition was filed but not when her underlying debts were incurred.Moreover, in determining whether the applicability of a state exemption statute, as recognized under
11 U.S.C. § 522 (b) (3) (A) , is a matter of federal bankruptcy law or state law, this court recognized that there is a split of federal authority on this choice of law question but assumed that the Bankruptcy Court would adhere to the rule adopted by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, pursuant to which state law governs. - The expanded, $250,000 homestead exemption set forth in P.A. 21-161 applies in bankruptcy proceedings filed on or after October 1, 2021, the effective date of the act, regardless of when the underlying debts accrued:
- The trustee could not prevail on his claim that the expanded homestead exemption does not apply to debts incurred prior to the effective date of P.A. 21-161:
P.A. 21-161 was silent as to the accrual date of the debts that are the subject of the postjudgment or bankruptcy proceeding governed by the amended homestead exemption, nothing in the language of the act indicated that the legislature had intended to carve out preexisting debts from the reach of that exemption, and
§ 52-352b , as part of the statutory scheme that regulates postjudgment procedures, simply defines what property is exempt, that is, what property is not subject to any court order for purposes of debt collection. - This court rejected the trustee’s claim that it should find in P.A. 21-161 an implicit carve-out for debts accrued prior to the act’s October 1, 2021 effective date insofar as the legislature had included such a carve-out in P.A. 93-301:
The trustee’s argument that the legislature, having been aware of the carve-out language in P.A. 93-301, would have clearly indicated if it had intended not to include a similar carve-out for preexisting debts in P.A. 21-161 was unavailing because it was inconsistent with basic rules of statutory interpretation, pursuant to which the fact that the legislature included a special carve-out for preexisting debts in the original homestead exemption but did not include one in P.A. 21-161 indicated an intent not to exclude preexisting debts from the scope of the expanded homestead exemption set forth in P.A. 21-161.
- There was no merit to the trustee’s claim that this court should find in P.A. 21-161 an implicit carve-out for debts accrued prior to the act’s October 1, 2021 effective date because a failure to do so would improperly give the act retroactive effect without the express authorization of the legislature:
Although the parties’ arguments centered primarily around the issue of whether P.A. 21-161 was a procedural or substantive amendment for purposes of
§ 55-3 , which applies only if the amendment has a “retrospective effect,” this court concluded that§ 55-3 did not apply to the present case because the increased homestead exemption set forth in P.A. 21-161 did not constitute retroactive legislation when C’s bankruptcy proceeding was initiated after the effective date of the act.Moreover, because it is not always apparent whether a new law has a “retrospective effect,” especially when the statutory changes solely alter the future, rather than the past, legal consequences of previous transactions or occurrences, this court looked to the approaches taken by the United States Supreme Court in Landgraf v. USI Film Products, 511 U.S. 244 (1994), in which the majority concluded that a new statute has a retroactive effect if it impairs established rights of the parties, imposes new duties or obligations that they could not reasonably have anticipated, or disturbs other reasonable, settled expectations, and in which the concurrence concluded that the focus of the retroactivity inquiry should not be on whether the amendment affects vested rights but, rather, on the relevant activity that the amendment regulates, and clarified that both approaches were part of a proper retroactivity analysis under Connecticut law.
The application of P.A. 21-161 to preexisting debts would not constitute a retroactive application under either of the Landgraf approaches.
Specifically, under the majority’s approach in Landgraf, there was no claim that P.A. 21-161 imposed any new duties or obligations on the parties, and applying the increased homestead exemption to preexisting debts would not be fundamentally unfair, insofar as it allegedly would frustrate the settled expectations of unsecured lenders who extended credit to C while the lower, $75,000 exemption was in place, because there was no evidence in the record that C’s unsecured creditors ever considered the equity in C’s home or relied on the size of the homestead exemption when they decided to extend C credit, and the creditors were presumed to have been aware that the legislature could increase the size of the homestead exemption at any time and that their rights might otherwise be adversely impacted by changes in federal or state law.
Furthermore, under the concurrence’s approach in Landgraf, applying P.A. 21-161 to preexisting debts would not qualify as a retroactive application of the law because the accrual of those debts was not the primary or principal activity that the act sought to regulate, insofar as
§ 52-352b is part of a chapter of the General Statutes that deals with postjudgment procedures, neither the original 1993 homestead exemption nor the 2021 amendment made any reference to the source or nature of the underlying debts involved, instead focusing entirely on the enforcement process, and, accordingly, it was clear that the purpose of the 2021 amendment was to specify the exemptions that were presently available to the debtor.
- The trustee could not prevail on his claim that the expanded homestead exemption does not apply to debts incurred prior to the effective date of P.A. 21-161:
Argued December 12, 2022—officially released July 18, 2023
Petition for bankruptcy relief, brought to the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Connecticut, where the court, Tancredi, J., overruled the trustee’s objection to the debtor’s claim for a homestead exemption, and the trustee appealed to the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut, where the court, Bolden, J., certified a question of law to this court concerning whether No. 21-161, § 1, of the 2021 Public Acts applied retroactively to debts incurred by the debtor before the act took effect.
Jeffrey Hellman, for the appellant (trustee).
Jenna N. Sternberg, for the appellee (debtor).
Opinion
MCDONALD, J. In 1993, the legislature, for the first time, enacted a so-called “homestead act,” whereby a debtor could protect up to $75,000 of the value of a primary residence from attachment in postjudgment proceedings or bankruptcy. See Public Acts 1993, No. 93-301, § 2 (P.A. 93-301). Although P.A. 93-301 had an effective date of October 1, 1993, and thus applied to any proceedings initiated on or after that date, the act included a special carve-out: the homestead exemption could not be claimed for debts accrued prior to the effective date.1 See P.A. 93-301, § 3. In 2021, the legislature amended the homestead act and replaced it with a new version that included several changes from the prior version of the act. For purposes of this appeal, the relevant change made by the legislature was to increase the exemption from $75,000 to $250,000,2 but this time the legislature did not include any carve-out for preexisting debts. See Public Acts 2021, No. 21-161, § 1 (P.A. 21-161). The primary question presented by this appeal, which reaches us in the form of a certified question in a bankruptcy appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut, is whether we should nevertheless read a carve-out into the 2021 public act. We decline to do so.
I
On November 22, 2021, the debtor, Elaine M. Cole, filed a petition for bankruptcy
The trustee of the bankruptcy estate, Anthony S. Novak, objected to the claimed homestead exemption. Id., 211. The trustee argued, among other things, that the debtor could not use the increased homestead amount because, although the bankruptcy proceeding was commenced after the October 1, 2021 effective date of P.A. 21-161, § 1, all of the debtor’s debts were incurred prior to that date. See id., 211–12.
Relying on the principle, embodied in
The trustee appealed from the decision of the Bankruptcy Court to the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut. The District Court indicated that it was inclined to agree with the conclusion of the Bankruptcy Court that P.A. 21-161, § 1, applies to preexisting debts in any bankruptcy proceeding brought on or after the effective date. Nevertheless, the District Court determined that the absence of an authoritative state court decision, the importance of the issue, and the capacity of certification to resolve the litigation all counseled for certification of the question to this court. The District Court therefore certified to this court the question of “[w]hether [P.A.] 21-161 applies retroactively to debts incurred by the debtor before [P.A.] 21-161 took effect or prospectively.” We accepted certification but, pursuant to
II
A
Because the certified question involves the intersection of federal bankruptcy law and Connecticut law governing postjudgment
The federal statute at issue is
Section 522 provides in relevant part that a debtor who opts for the alternative exemption can protect “any property that is exempt under Federal [nonbankruptcy] law . . . or State or local law that is applicable on the date of the filing of the petition to the place in which the debtor’s domicile has been located for the 730 days immediately preceding the date of the filing of the petition . . . .” (Emphasis added.)
The threshold question is whether the applicability of a state exemption statute, as recognized under
The Second Circuit, however, has reached a different conclusion with respect to the choice of law question, holding that whether and to what extent an exemption is applicable on the date a petition is filed is a matter solely of state law. See CFCU Community Credit Union v. Hayward, supra, 552 F.3d 259 (“[although] federal law governs the date on which the exemption comes into play, [state] law governs the nature and scope of the exemption“); see also First National Bank of Mobile v. Norris, 701 F.2d 902, 905 (11th Cir. 1983) (rejecting argument that
B
We turn our attention, therefore, to the trustee’s argument that the legislature intended the amended homestead exemption to apply to bankruptcy petitions filed
1
Because the applicability of the expanded homestead exemption presents a question of statutory interpretation, we begin with the text of the act. See
On its face, P.A. 21-161, § 1, is silent as to the accrual date of the debts that are the subject of the postjudgment proceeding or bankruptcy governed by the amended homestead exemption. Nothing in the language of the act indicates that the legislature had intended to carve out preexisting (or any other) debts from the reach of the exemption. Section 52-352b is part of chapter 906 of the General Statutes, which regulates postjudgment procedures, and the statute simply defines what property is exempt, that is, “not subject to any form of process or court order for the purpose of debt collection . . . .”
We do not understand the trustee to contest that this is the plain meaning of the statutory text. Rather, he contends that we should nevertheless find an implicit carve-out for preexisting debts for two reasons. First, the public act that created the prior version of the statute contained such a carve-out. See P.A. 93-301, §§ 2 and 3. Second, interpreting P.A. 21-161, § 1, not to include a similar carve-out would be to give the act retroactive effect without the express authorization of the legislature. We consider each argument in turn.
2
The trustee first contends that we should read a carve-out for preexisting debts into P.A. 21-161, § 1, because the legislature included such a carve-out in P.A. 93-301, the act that created the initial homestead exemption. Public Act 93-301, § 3, provides: “This act shall take effect October 1, 1993, and shall be applicable to any lien for any obligation or claim arising on or after said date.” (Emphasis added.) The federal courts have read the highlighted language to create a carve-out for preexisting debts in bankruptcy proceedings. See, e.g., Gernat v. Belford, 192 B.R. 601, 604-605 (D. Conn.), aff‘d sub nom. In re Gernat, 98 F.3d 729 (2d Cir. 1996). The trustee’s argument appears to be that the legislature, having been aware of the language and judicial interpretations of the prior act, would have clearly indicated had it intended not to include a similar carve-out in P.A. 21-161, § 1.
Even if we were to agree with the trustee that it is appropriate to look to the legislative history of the act, however; see Cohen v. Rossi, 346 Conn. 642, 665-66, 300 A.3d 1146 (2023) (plurality opinion); see also id., 705 n.10 (Ecker, J., concurring in part and concurring in the judgment); we are not persuaded that the trustee’s interpretation is correct. Indeed, the trustee’s argument runs headlong into a basic rule of statutory interpretation. “As we have stated many times, [when] a statute, with reference to one subject contains a given provision, the omission of such provision from a similar statute concerning a related subject . . . is significant to show that a different intention existed.” (Internal quotation marks omitted.) Asylum Hill Problem Solving Revitalization Assn. v. King, 277 Conn. 238, 256, 890 A.2d 522 (2006). This principle applies with equal force to reenactments of previous statutes. See, e.g., Gilmore v. Pawn King, Inc., 313 Conn. 535, 543-48, 98 A.3d 808 (2014).
The fact that the legislature included a special carve-out for preexisting debts in the original homestead act but did not include one in the 2021 act indicates an intent not to exclude preexisting debts from the scope of the expanded homestead exemption. Indeed, it makes perfect sense
3
Finally, we turn our attention to the issue at the core of the certified question, as originally framed by the District Court. The trustee’s primary argument is that interpreting P.A. 21-161, § 1, not to include a carve-out for preexisting debts would give the act retroactive effect without the express authorization of the legislature. Specifically, the trustee contends that P.A. 21-161, § 1, effected a substantive change in the law and that, under
“It is well established that
But dispositive considerations can arise well before we reach the substantive/procedural junction. Section 55-3 comes into play—that is, we only need to determine if a new provision of the General Statutes is substantive or procedural—only if the amendment would have a “retrospective effect.” Section 55-3 does not define the term “retrospective effect,” however, and whether a new law would have such an effect in a given case is not always apparent. See, e.g., Shannon v. Commissioner of Housing, supra, 322 Conn. 204 (“deciding when a statute operates retroactively is not always a simple or mechanical task” (internal quotation marks omitted)). As United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia explained in Martin v. Hadix, 527 U.S. 343 (1999), asking whether a change in the law is intended to operate retroactively “leaves open the key question: retroactive in reference to what?” Id., 362 (Scalia, J., concurring in part and concurring in the judgment).
Many retroactivity cases, and most of the easy ones, involve “what modern scholarship calls primary retroactivity—altering the past legal consequences of past actions. [This includes] legislative creation of criminal or civil liability for completed acts, significantly lessening or adding onto the burdens of past contracts (particularly debt contracts), legislative termination of accrued claims for relief [regardless of whether they are] the subject of a pending action, and legislative undoing of final judgments no longer subject to appeal.” (Emphasis added; footnotes omitted; internal quotation marks omitted.) A. Woolhandler, “Public Rights, Private Rights, and Statutory Retroactivity,” 94 Geo. L.J. 1015, 1022-23 (2006). These situations tend to be governed by well established rules, such as that “[a] criminal statute is said to have [primary] retroactive application if it applies to crimes allegedly committed prior to its date of enactment.” (Internal quotation marks omitted.) State v. Bischoff, 337 Conn. 739, 746, 258 A.3d 14 (2021); see also
More troublesome is so-called secondary retroactivity, which refers to statutory changes that solely alter the future legal consequences of past transactions or occurrences. See, e.g., Bowen v. Georgetown University Hospital, 488 U.S. 204, 219 (1988) (Scalia, J., concurring) (discussing distinction between primary and secondary retroactivity); J. Laitos, “Legislative Retroactivity,” 52 Wash. U. J. Urb. & Contemp. L. 81, 84–85 (1997) (same). Many changes in the law could be characterized as retroactive in some respect. That is to say, they attach some new, future legal consequences to actions that were taken or decisions that were made prior to their enactment. See, e.g., A. Woolhandler, supra, 94 Geo. L.J. 1022 (“[s]ome modern judges and even more modern scholars see the retroactivity-prospectivity line in the civil context as logically illusory, because all legal change may defeat expectations, creating winners and losers“). That alone is not enough to render a statute retroactive. See, e.g., D. Bassett, “In the Wake of Schooner Peggy: Deconstructing Legislative Retroactivity Analysis,” 69 U. Cin. L. Rev. 453, 467 (2001) (“[e]ven when laws expressly state that they are to be applied prospectively, it is virtually certain that they will affect expectations and prior
Take alimony, for example. The legislature might amend the alimony laws to make them less favorable to either the payer or the payee. Such a law would almost certainly qualify as retroactive if applied to divorces and alimony awards that were finalized prior to its passage, and we would require a clear statement of legislative intent before applying it to them.9 But, surely, applying the new law in a future divorce action to a couple who married in 1990 would not be characterized as a retroactive application, even though the substantive legal rules and duties that govern the couple will now differ from those that were in place when they made the choice to marry. In that case, the opposite presumption applies; we would assume that the new rules do apply to existing marriages, unless the legislature provides otherwise. The fact that the change in the law is substantive is of little moment. The reason for the different outcome is that the relevant reference point for purposes of retroactivity is the divorce, which happens after the change in the law, and not the marriage, which happened before.
The relevant reference point is not always so intuitively clear. Hadix was a particularly thorny case. The attorney’s fee statute at issue in that case arguably could have been retroactively applicable to five different categories of events.10 Before the United States Supreme Court could assess whether the ordinary presumption against retroactivity applied, the court first had to identify the relevant reference point or points. See Martin v. Hadix, supra, 527 U.S. 357–58.
In the present case, as in the alimony hypothetical, there really are just two possibilities.
The debtor disagrees. She contends that the only relevant consideration is when her bankruptcy proceeding was commenced, as the relevant reference point is the initiation of the bankruptcy proceeding, not the debts to which the homestead exemption would apply. If the expanded homestead exemption were applied to a previously commenced bankruptcy proceeding, then a retroactivity issue would arise. But, she contends, merely to apply the expanded exemption in a bankruptcy proceeding that was commenced after the effective date of P.A. 21-161, § 1, does not raise any retroactivity concerns, regardless of when the debts accrued, and, so,
For secondary retroactivity claims of this sort, courts, including this court, have struggled to identify the proper reference point or points and to define exactly when a new law so alters the future legal consequences of prior conduct that it can be said to operate retroactively with respect to that conduct. The seminal case in which the United States Supreme Court attempted to resolve these issues was Landgraf v. USI Film Products, 511 U.S. 244 (1994). In Landgraf, a five justice majority recognized that the high court had used various formulations to articulate when a substantive change in the law is being applied retroactively, including that a statute or law is retroactive if it “changes the legal consequences of acts completed before its effective date“; (internal quotation marks omitted) id., 269 n.23; “gives a quality or effect to acts or conduct [that] they did not have or did not contemplate when they were performed“; (internal quotation marks omitted) id.; or “takes away or impairs vested rights acquired under existing laws, or creates a new obligation, imposes a new duty, or attaches a new disability, in respect to transactions or considerations already past . . . .” (Internal quotation marks omitted.) Id., 269. Ultimately, the Landgraf majority settled on the following formulation: “[T]he court must ask whether the new provision attaches new legal consequences to events completed before its enactment. The conclusion that a particular rule operates retroactively comes at the end of a process of judgment concerning the nature and extent of the change in the law and the degree of connection between the operation of the new rule and a relevant past event.” (Internal quotation marks omitted.) Id., 269–70. Put differently, “[a] new statute would have retroactive effect . . . [if] it would impair rights a party possessed when he acted, increase a party’s liability for past conduct, or impose new duties with respect to transactions already completed.” Id., 280; see also Martin v. Hadix, supra, 527 U.S. 358 (retroactivity assessment “should be informed and guided by familiar considerations of fair notice, reasonable reliance, and settled expectations” (internal quotation marks omitted)).
The Landgraf majority’s formulation certainly covers the full ambit of primary retroactivity. With respect to secondary retroactivity, however, the guidance is less instructive. As we discussed, virtually every substantive change in the law has the potential to upset someone’s expectations
In a concurring opinion, Justice Scalia, joined by two other members of the court, proposed a different approach to retroactivity questions. See Landgraf v. USI Film Products, 511 U.S. 244, 290 (1994) (Scalia, J., concurring in the judgments). The concurrence argued that “[t]he critical issue . . . is not whether the rule affects vested rights . . . but rather what is the relevant activity that the rule regulates. [In the absence of a] clear statement otherwise, only such relevant activity [that] occurs after the effective date of the statute is covered. Most statutes are meant to regulate primary conduct, and hence will not be applied in trials involving conduct that occurred before their effective date. But other statutes have a different purpose and therefore a different relevant retroactivity event.” (Emphasis omitted; internal quotation marks omitted.) Id., 291 (Scalia, J., concurring in the judgments). By way of example, the concurrence explained, “[a] new ban on gambling applies to existing casinos and casinos under construction . . . even though it attaches a new disability to those past investments. The relevant retroactivity event is the primary activity of gambling, not the primary activity of constructing casinos.” (Citation omitted; internal quotation marks omitted.) Id., 293–94 n.3 (Scalia, J., concurring in the judgments).
Although the majority’s approach in Landgraf is, of course, the law of the land, at least as far as federal law is concerned, the United States Supreme Court has, at times, also relied on the Landgraf concurrence. See, e.g., Hughes Aircraft Co. v. United States ex rel. Schumer, 520 U.S. 939, 947 (1997) (majority approach in Landgraf is not “the exclusive definition of presumptively impermissible retroactive legislation“); id., 951 (citing concurrence’s approach); see also, e.g., Vartelas v. Holder, 566 U.S. 257, 269-70 (2012) (part of what court considers in assessing whether application of statute would be retroactive is what primary activity Congress sought to regulate). Accordingly, the lower federal courts have found both approaches instructive when faced with thorny questions regarding secondary retroactivity. See, e.g., Covino v. Reopel, 89 F.3d 105, 106–108 (2d Cir. 1996). Insofar as our prior retroactivity cases have not provided adequate guidance in this respect, we take this opportunity to clarify that both approaches are part of a proper retroactivity analysis under Connecticut law.
In this case, both the majority’s and the concurrence’s approaches in Landgraf point to the same result: application of P.A. 21-161, § 1, to preexisting debts would not constitute a retroactive application. Under the majority’s approach, we look to factors such as whether allowing the debtor to avail herself of the higher homestead exemption would impair established rights of the creditors or the trustee, impose new duties or obligations that they could not reasonably have anticipated, or disturb other reasonable, settled expectations. See Landgraf v. USI Film Products, supra, 511 U.S. 270, 280. There is
With respect to the rights and expectations of the parties regarding the unsecured debts at issue in this case, we are persuaded by the following analysis: “The reality of modern commercial transactions is that a lender who reasonably expects specific property to be available to satisfy an obligation . . . takes a secured position in the property. A lender’s expectation of later realization of payment from unsecured property in existence at the time of contract is, [in the absence of] unusual circumstances, an expectation founded on pure speculation. Realization of payment from such property is necessarily dependent [on] circumstances and rights that do not exist at the time of [the] unsecured contract and that are not created by it. It is dependent [on] continued retention of ownership and equity in the property by a debtor as well as the subsequent creation of a lien by judgment and/or levy.
“A creditor’s right to enforcement of the contract through remedy of judgment and levy against specific unsecured property of a debtor is an implied contract right. But the contractual relationship of parties is not substantially impaired by later legislation compromising or eliminating that right unless the right otherwise has substantial value to the contractual relationship at the time of the legislation complained of. [When] an unsecured claim has not been reduced to judgment prior to such legislation, the abstract right of potential enforcement out of specific unsecured property, standing alone, ordinarily has no substantial value to the contractual relationship in light of modern commercial transactions. This is particularly so [when] the legislation compromising or eliminating the right is in an area of established, long-standing legislative control and regulation, such as homestead exemption laws. The abstract right is simply one without reasonable expectation of fulfillment.” (Footnote omitted.) In re Johnson, 69 B.R. 988, 993 (Bankr. D. Minn. 1987); see also Central Bank v. Hickey, 238 Conn. 778, 784, 680 A.2d 298 (1996) (“the very nature of an unsecured debt is that the creditor has no current legal interest in the assets of its debtor“); Massa v. Nastri, 125 Conn. 144, 147, 3 A.2d 839 (1939) (established rights that are presumptively secure from retroactive civil legislation “must be something more than such a mere expectation as may be based [on] an anticipated continuance of the present general laws” (internal quotation marks omitted)).
For this reason, we reject the trustee’s argument that applying the increased homestead exemption to preexisting debts would be fundamentally unfair because it would frustrate the settled expectations of unsecured lenders who extended credit to C while the lower, $75,000 exemption was in place. There is no evidence in the record that the debtor’s creditors ever considered the equity in her house, much less that they relied to their detriment on the size of the Connecticut homestead exemption when they decided to extend her credit. Rather, the unsecured creditors are presumed to have been aware that the legislature could increase the size of the homestead exemption at any time and that their rights might otherwise be adversely impacted by changes in federal or state law. See, e.g., CFCU Community Credit Union v. Hayward, supra, 552 F.3d 268; see also, e.g., In re Van Hove, 78 B.R. 917, 920 (N.D. Iowa 1987) (lenders’ reasonable contract expectations were not impaired by application of increased exemption, in light of state’s “clearly established . . . rule that the extent of the debtor’s exemption rights [is] determined by reference to the exemption
The result is the same under the concurrence’s approach in Landgraf. See Landgraf v. USI Film Products, supra, 511 U.S. 291 (Scalia, J., concurring in the judgments). Applying P.A. 21-161, § 1, to preexisting debts would not qualify as a retroactive application of the law because the accrual of those debts is not the principal activity that the law seeks to regulate. See id. As we discussed; see footnote 6 of this opinion;
We thus conclude that P.A. 21-161, § 1, is not retroactive as applied to the
The answer to the certified question, as reformulated, that is, does the expanded homestead exemption contained in P.A. 21-161, § 1, apply in bankruptcy proceedings filed on or after the effective date of the act to debts that accrued prior to that date, is “yes.”
In this opinion the other justices concurred.