Law Commons^™

Force-Placed Insurance: The Lending Industry's "Dirty Little Secret", Dana Cronkite

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Force-placed insurance, also called lender-placed insurance, is the insurance policy mortgage lenders obtain on behalf of borrowers when borrowers fail to maintain hazard insurance on their homes. Although the possibility of force-placed insurance is contemplated by mortgage contracts, the policies often provide little coverage and are much costlier than insurance policies acquired on the open market. Lenders obtain the policies at unfairly high prices and sometimes receive kickbacks from the force-placed insurance companies, while borrowers alone bear the burden of paying for them. As such, lenders have no incentive to obtain force-placed insurance at fair prices with adequate coverage. The …

Property Title Trouble In Non-Judicial Foreclosure States: The Ibanez Time Bomb?, Elizabeth Renuart

William & Mary Business Law Review

The economic crisis gripping the United States began when large numbers of homeowners defaulted on poorly underwritten subprime mortgage loans. Demand from Wall Street seduced mortgage lenders, brokers, and other players to churn out mortgage loans in extraordinary numbers. Securitization, the process of utilizing mortgage loans to back investment instruments, fanned the fire. The resulting volume also caused the parties to these deals to often handle and transfer the legally important documents that secure the resulting investments—the loan notes and mortgages—in a careless and sometimes fraudulent manner.

The consequences of this behavior are now becoming evident. All over the country, …

The Debt Financing Of Parenthood, Melissa B. Jacoby

Melissa B. Jacoby

In this contribution to the symposium Show Me the Money: Making Markets in Forbidden Exchange, I explore an under-appreciated participant in the assisted reproduction and adoption industries: consumer lenders. Through fertility clinics and other service providers, financial institutions market and distribute loans specifically to finance acquisition of treatments, drugs, and human eggs. Adoption foundations and agencies advertise for-profit loans to intended parents, while small foundations offer adoption loans that appear to be low-cost financially but may condition loan approval on intended parent characteristics such as religious observance, marital status, sexual orientation, and adherence to traditional gender roles. After discussing how …

Home Mortgage Problems Through The Lens Of Bankruptcy, Melissa B. Jacoby

Melissa B. Jacoby

Based on a lecture at a predatory lending conference at Loyola University New Orleans School of Law, this brief paper discusses the 2007 Consumer Bankruptcy Project and how the empirical study of bankruptcy law informs our understanding of the intersection of mortgages and homeownership with financial distress, and whether bankruptcy can provide meaningful redress.

Secured Transaction History: The Impact Of English Smuggling On The Chattel Mortgage Acts In The Spanish Borderlands, George Lee Flint Jr, Marie Juliet Alfaro

Faculty Articles

Spanish colonies, including the territories of Florida, Louisiana, and southwestern America, acknowledged the jurisdiction of Spanish royal decrees. The colonies approached the registration of mortgages in a similar but more tentative fashion, recognizing the distances between the borderlands and the registrar’s offices. The law developed differently in Florida and Louisiana, which were administered by a different governmental body. While the registration process was required for chattel mortgages on slaves, there is no evidence the rules were enforced or applied to other types of mortgages on personalty. However, in 1770, Louisiana adopted a filing requirement for chattel mortgages for all slaves …

The Enforcement Of Oral Promises To Give Real Estate Security, Theodore A. Smedley

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Contracts - Specific Enforcement Of An Executory Accord, Benjamin H. Dewey

Michigan Law Review

Sometime previous to the suit in question, defendant had executed a mortgage to the plaintiff, the loan secured by such mortgage to be repaid in installments. After having paid some but not all of the installments, defendant defaulted. As a result of negotiations between the parties and the Federal Land Bank of Omaha, it was agreed that the defendant should pay a lump sum in full satisfaction of the balance of the installments due under the mortgage. Performance was later tendered under this agreement, but the plaintiff refused to accept same, and subsequently brought suit in equity to foreclose the …