Loyola Chicago Law School Hosts Symposium on the Effects of Crisis

A couple weekends ago, I attended a conference at Loyola Chicago School of Law on the Effects of the Financial Crisis on Consumers.  In one panel, Creola Johnson from Ohio State University Michael E. Moritz College of Law, gave a fascinating talk on punishments that should ensue for various fakers (fake landlords), breachers (owner-landlords who are collecting rent and not paying the mortgage), deceivers (foreclosure rescue scammers), and slackers (banks and bulk property buyers), which include putting the fraudsters’ photos on big billboards, along with what they did, like this:

Chris Petersen of Utah law provided a clear description of how MERS works and a great summary of the status of some of the pending litigation. Fellow blogger  Alan White of Valparaiso (but visiting at CUNY right now) gave a very useful description of the missing documents mess, especially helpful to me in a case in which I just wrote and amicus brief.  I especially liked it when he said that he knows of no case in which a plaintiff-lender has prevailed in a foreclosure when challenged without producing the original note. Kathleen Engel of Suffolk posed various creative solutions to the crisis, including non-bankruptcy cramdown ideas. Later in the day, after a fantastic luncheon speech by Dan Lindsay of the Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago about real world harms of the crisis on clients, Albany Law professor Elizabeth Renaurt enlightened us on the problems in non-judicial foreclosures and possible solutions, including some that’ll make them more like judicial foreclosures, and Richard Alderman of Houston Law Center discussed the intersection of fair debt collection cases and arbitration clauses. Dee Pridgen of Wyoming School of Law and Max Huffman of the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law both discussed various behavioral economics theories in two different contexts, including Truth in Lending and many other consumer laws for Dee and antitrust for Max.  Stay tuned for the upcoming issue of the Loyola consumer Law journal, which will publish the papers coming out of the conference.