New characterizations of old bankruptcy rules

This paper presents axiomatic characterizations of two bankruptcy rules discussed in Jewish legal literature: the Constrained Equal Awards rule and the Contested Garment principle (the latter is defined only for two-creditor problems.) A major property in these characterizations is independence of irrelevant claims, which requires that if an individual claim exceeds the total to be allocated the excess claim should be considered irrelevant.The author gratefully acknowledges helpful conversations with Oscar Volij.