How we assemble the empirical dataset on § 1328(f) successive-filing patterns. All sources are public; the methodology is versioned and citable.
Data sources
Source
What it provides
BAPCPA Table 6 (Administrative Office of U.S. Courts)
Annual case-disposition data by district. Provides discharged / dismissed counts.
Federal Judicial Center IDB
Case-level public dataset (filing date, district, chapter, disposition).
CourtListener / RECAP
Docket-level pulls, particularly for cases involving discharge orders that name § 1328(f).
PACER (limited, fee-based)
Targeted document pulls where docket text indicates lookback issue.
Identifying lookback cases
A case is flagged as a candidate for § 1328(f) treatment when:
The filing date is within 4 years (Ch.7/11/12) or 2 years (Ch.13) of an earlier case for the same debtor (matched on SSN where available, debtor name + address otherwise).
The earlier case received a discharge order (not just a dismissal).
The current case is a Chapter 13 (because § 1328(f) only bars Ch.13 discharge).
Outcomes are then classified by reading the discharge order or final docket text:
Discharge issued: court did not apply § 1328(f) (typically because the prior case was outside the lookback or did not actually result in discharge despite appearance)
Discharge denied (1328(f)): court applied the lookback bar
Plan completed without discharge: debtor finished plan payments but no discharge issued (often a 1328(f) case)
Case dismissed before discharge stage: outcome turns on dismissal grounds, not on 1328(f) per se
Limitations
SSN matching: not always reliable; FJC data masks SSN, name+address matching has false positives.
Pro-se debtors: overrepresented in lookback-caught populations; the rule is one of the most common pro-se traps.
Pre-BAPCPA baseline: § 1328(f) was introduced in 2005; pre-2005 there was no equivalent bar, so historical comparison is not direct.
Versioning
Each release of the dataset is tagged in the public repository with the data-cutoff date and a methodology hash. Citation format and DOI (when assigned) are provided in the dataset README.