Sen. Elizabeth Warren first stepped into politics to fight for fairer bankruptcy laws, a topic she had spent years researching as a legal academic. In 2005, she lost, when Congress passed a banking industry-backed law that hurt struggling families. She writes that it, “made the 2008 financial crisis significantly worse: experts found that the bill ‘caused about 800,000 additional mortgage defaults and 250,000 additional foreclosures.’” Now, the latest plan Warren has unveiled returns to this issue so at the center of her legal and political careers.

Warren’s new bankruptcy plan takes aim at the worst parts of the 2005 bankruptcy bill, making it easier to file for bankruptcy under a single system, rather than the current policy in which many families—particularly, she notes, black families—are forced into, the more expensive and onerous Chapter 13. Filers would be able to choose from options to tailor a bankruptcy that best suited their situation: “For example, someone might use bankruptcy to cure a home mortgage delinquency while continuing to pay other debts outside of bankruptcy. Or if someone has long-term debt she needs to restructure, non-exempt property such as a car that she needs to get to work, a family home she wants to protect, or if the debtor simply wants to try to pay her creditors, the debtor can also choose to file a payment plan and request that the court limit the stay of collection actions to the extent necessary to execute that plan.”

Warren’s plan would cut down on paperwork, delays, and the money that people with no money are forced to pay for lawyers. She’d also allow renters in bankruptcy to keep paying their rent to avoid eviction, allow parents to “spend a reasonable amount of money on toys and books and basic recreation activities for their kids,” and allow union members to continue paying their dues—all things that 2005 bankruptcy law prohibits. She’d end the prohibition on discharging student loan debt in bankruptcy, a prohibition that has helped crush so many people’s dreams. She’d allow people to protect their homes and cars, while cracking down on loopholes used by rich people to make their own bankruptcies as cushy as possible.