552
Souter, J., dissenting
The question before the Court is whether the price received at a foreclosure sale after compliance with state procedural rules in a noncollusive sale must be treated conclusively as the "reasonably equivalent value" of the mortaged property and in answering that question, the words and meaning of § 548(a)(2)(A) are plain. See Patterson v. Shu-mate, 504 U. S. 753, 760 (1992) (party seeking to defeat plain meaning of Bankruptcy Code text bears an "exceptionally heavy burden") (internal quotation marks omitted); Perrin v. United States, 444 U. S. 37, 42 (1979) (statutory words should be given their ordinary meaning). A trustee is authorized to avoid certain recent prebankruptcy transfers, including those on foreclosure sales, that a bankruptcy court determines were not made in exchange for "a reasonably equivalent value." Although this formulation makes no pretense to mathematical precision, an ordinary speaker of English would have no difficulty grasping its basic thrust: the bankruptcy court must compare the price received by the insolvent debtor and the worth of the item when sold and set aside the transfer if the former was substantially ("[un]-reasonabl[y]") "less than" the latter.3 Nor would any ordinary English speaker, concerned to determine whether a foreclosure sale was collusive or procedurally irregular (an enquiry going exclusively to the process by which a transaction was consummated), direct an adjudicator, as the Court now holds Congress did, to ascertain whether the sale had realized "less than a reasonably equivalent value" (an enquiry described in quintessentially substantive terms).4
foreclosure-sale price, for the important (if intuitive) reason that properties with higher market values can be expected to sell for more on foreclosure.
3 Indeed, it is striking that this is what the Court says the statute (probably) does mean, with respect to almost every transfer other than a sale of property upon foreclosure. See ante, at 545.
4 The Court protests, ante, at 546, that its formulation, see ante, at 536, deviates only subtly from the reading advanced here and purports not to disagree that the statute compels an enquiry "into the relationship of the
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