With all due respect to Prof. Levitan, his comment is over the top. This opinion is by a presiding judge in a large circuit. He has responsibilities to his judges to help them figure out how to deal with cases where novel, complicated arguments and fact patterns are being presented. I don’t know him, or much about him other than his abreviated CV, but he is in a position where he has incentives to get it right more than to prove that he’s right. There is a difference, and it’s a difference between being on the bench and being an academic (no disrespect, Prof. Levitan). Judges get respect from their peers for being helpful in moving cases along. Professors get attention by being different.
If the judge is wrong, he has the case and the basic rules set up pretty well for an appeal and the issues will be pretty clear. I don’t know if addressed all the claims by Ms. Congress, but I don’t think he needed to. The choice of law and enforceability of the note issues were pretty fatal.
This paragraph of Prof. Levitan’s seems almost entirely incorrect:
“Perhaps the most important thing to note about the opinion is what isn’t there. There was no consideration of the chain-of-title issue in the opinion. Let me repeat, the court said nothing about whether there was proper chain-of-title in the securitization. Instead, the court avoided dealing with it. That means that this ruling isn’t grounds for sounding the “all clear” on chain-of-title. At best, it is grounds for arguing that homeowners won’t be able to raise chain-of-title problems. As we’ve seen with Ibanez, that’s clearly incorrect, and a closer look at the Congress ruling shows that it might be an Alabama special, not applicable elsewhere.”
Which chain of title? The security interest or the note? As for the note, the court essentially said ownership of the note doesn’t matter when a party has enforcement rights. Prof. Bloom said as much in his testimony.
As for homeowner defenses, I disagree with Prof. Levitan because this case clearly does allow them at an eviction trial, and as I said earlier, allows them a pretty broad path. I see this as a homeowner win, or at least homeowner-favorable.
As for applying Ibanez, the key fact in that case was that there was no prior assignment of the security interest before the foreclosure process began (and the court was extremely liberal about how that could have happened, but still found that it hadn’t – kind of a game over for USBank), and that USBank tried to fix it after the fact, which it couldn’t. This opinion is often egregiously misrepresented as requiring recorded assignments in Mass. – it explicitly does not. It is also cited as involving MERS. It definitely does not, but it may well be a very pro-MERS case in application.
As for the applicability, state district court decisions are hard to cite for authority anyway, and usually a sign that 1) you’re reaching for anything, anything (aka “as some court somewhere held”); or 2) that you’re not familiar with in-state authority. At the district court level, I can only remember one time that I cited out-of-state law (Maryland, and I did so very reluctantly having lived there), and I don’t remember ever having other state cites used against me. I have a strong bias against it unless it’s absolutely necessary. In practice, too much involves statutes that are not perfectly comparable to other states, for one. But, in the case I used, the issue was exactly what I was looking for, a mortgagee’s obligation after receiving a payoff demand for an odd-ball lien securing two notes, and the mortgagee only provided one account, leaving the other note/account unpaid when all was said and done. The court here followed it and held a payoff demand for a single lien requires all relevant account balances to be provided. That was sweet.
More important was that Prof. Bloom agreed that the law regarding notes and mortgages would be Alabama law, and that Alabama has an identical statute to UCC 3-301 for the rights of enforcement by note holders that makes ownership less important than ownership rights. Prof. Levitan calls this a side-step, but it looks like the judge could have cared less who the owner was. Either he’ll be upheld, or he’ll be made to look foolish on appeal. What Adam calls a “side-step” on 1) the applicability of NY law; and 2) whether ownership matters when enforcement rights is really the issue are clearly identifiable questions of law for de novo appeal (that is, the trial court’s opinion on the law doesn’t count for anything).
The take away I have on this case is that Judge Vowell’s circuit allows more defenses to eviction than I am used to seeing. (Minneapolis and St. Paul both have Housing Courts that are cattle calls, and while the judges diligently enforce procedure on noticing the defendant(s), compliance with the Protecting Tenants at Foreclosure Act of 2009, naming all adult parties known who might have putuative independent possessory rights, etc., they do not throw the proceeding open very often to defenses like Ms. Congress’s and are almost always upheld on appeal, admittedly due in part to eviction appeals being exceedingly difficult and expensive if they’re not set up correctly).
What I don’t know is whether he and his judges figure “might as well” if the alternative is that they’re going to see waves of post-eviction quiet titles instead. A few Alabama practitioners perspective would help on this.
Also, it appears there were two trials on this and that makes untangling some of the procedure difficult. The judge says in the middle of page 7 that there was a “first trial.” I’m not sure what happened there or why there was a second trial. Yves?
So, yes. As a district court opinion, it isn’t legal precedent anywhere, just as any other district court anywhere opinion isn’t legal precedent anywhere – appeals courts review questions of law de novo. That’s not what Prof. Levitan said, and I’m pretty sure it’s not what he meant, either.
David J. Stern is winding up his infamous foreclosure practice, reports the Associated Press, citing a Securities and Exchange filing. The law firm's fall has been swift and steep, and it offers many reasons for schadenfreude: Stern lived the high life on the backs for borrowers foreclosed on with fraudulent documents, borrowers who weren't consistently given notice they were being foreclosed on. His firm's fall has exacerbated the problems in the Florida court system because his cases are being transferred to other lawyers who must now get up to speed on them.
But there's one thing his fall isn't, much as I wish it were, and that's the end of an era.
If we're to restore the rule of law in foreclosure cases, it's going to take a lot more than the fall of Stern's firm, which is just one of several "foreclosure mills" in Florida. Others are under investigation. Maybe some of them will fall too. Maybe not.
But the issue runs nationally, not just in Florida. Lender Processing Services (LPS) alone has hundreds of "network firms" following its due-process-abusing practices. A firm in Pennsylvania may have jeopardized thousands of foreclosures there by having nonlawyers do the cases. And the situation in nonjudicial states, where even foreclosure mills aren't necessary to take back homes, is worse.
If anyone hearing of the Stern firm's demise mistakes it for news that change has really come to the foreclosure world, that will be saddest news of all.
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