Law Commons^™

Well Enough Alone: Liability For Wrongful Foreclosure, Chad J. Pomeroy

Faculty Articles

Part I of this Article both sets the stage for the current environment, in which banks and their officers and directors are under the spotlight and face an increasing amount of pressure due to their perceived role in the instigation of the Great Recession, and then examines in detail improvident lending and wrongful foreclosure, two of the wrongful acts banks have committed in connection with our current financial crisis that have generated a substantial amount of public interest and comment.

Part II examines the potential of officer and director liability for these disparate elements of the Great Recession, looking first …

The Real Doctrine & Covenants, Chad J. Pomeroy

Faculty Articles

Developers have recently begun creating, and attaching to the property they sell to consumers, what is known as a "recovery fee." These recovery fees are "new" in that most lawyers are not familiar with them and in that they seem to operate in a novel manner and are bottomed on novel claims. In essence, they create and levy a fee on subsequent owners each time the property is transferred, which fee purports to reimburse developers for infrastructure and other development costs. Because they seem new, and because they involve transfers from relatively small and unsophisticated parties to relatively large and …

The Shape Of Property, Chad J. Pomeroy

Faculty Articles

“Shape” means “a mode of existence or form of being having identifying features” or the “form or embodiment” of something. Form and feature, in turn, arise from pressure and time. Property law has a shape all its own: it exists as a unique body of law, with distinctive conventions and rules. And that shape, those conventions and rules, derive from a variety of pressures that have, over the centuries, molded property law into its present form. This paper seeks to understand and explain the shape of a particular area of property law – that of property forms.

Of course, this …

Think Twice: Charging Orders And Creditor Property Rights, Chad J. Pomeroy

Faculty Articles

What do you do? As a lawyer (or prospective lawyer), I mean – what do you do (or what will you do) in exchange for a salary or hourly fee? You will probably be expecting a lot of money for your services; so what, exactly, is it that you will do to justify that payment?

The answer, of course, is varied because lawyers do lots of different things. And, among these activities, there are some things that only lawyers can do. Chief among those is suing people. Suing people is something that only lawyers do because states do not generally …

Why Is Property So Hard?, Chad J. Pomeroy

Faculty Articles

This paper seeks to flesh out the heterogeneity and inherent difficulty of property law and to analyze it in depth. Part I begins this examination by setting up a taxonomy for property law and then describing the heterogeneity inherent in that context and the costs associated with that variability. Real estate law has continually evolved throughout American history — changing from a small, local business to a large, national one, spanning jurisdictional lines and limits — and it is the haphazard and varied nature of this evolution that has created this difficulty and cost. This is notable when contrasted with …

Ending Surprise Liens On Real Property, Chad J. Pomeroy

Faculty Articles

Academics, lawmakers, and the general public have long believed that secret liens are problematic. In real property, these are liens that are not recorded in the real property filing system. Secret liens become especially problematic when they are enforced, despite their secrecy, against subsequent purchasers of the property. If the purchaser does not satisfy the lien by paying the underlying debt, the lien holder can foreclose on the property. One of the main purposes of having real property recording statutes was to avoid surprise liens (secret liens afforded priority over subsequent purchasers) and ensure that real estate purchasers and investors …