Judiciary
Meet Judge Arthur Schack, Foreclosure Watchdog
Posted Jul 28, 2008, 04:56 am CST
By Debra Cassens Weiss
In pending foreclosure cases, Judge Arthur Schack of Brooklyn, N.Y., doesn’t always wait for an opposing lawyer to raise issues about the ownership of mortgages. He investigates the problem himself and dismisses most cases sua sponte.
Schack was mentioned in two articles over the weekend, one in the Wall Street Journal and one in the New York Times.
Schack, a former counsel to the Major League Baseball Players Association, is one of an increasing number of judges who are raising questions about the ownership of mortgages in foreclosure. Often it is difficult to sort out the answers since many mortgages have been pooled, securitized and sold to investors.
Schack has refused to allow foreclosure in 13 out of 14 published decisions since Jan 1, dismissing 12 cases without prejudice because of unproven ownership, according to the Times.
The Wall Street Journal highlighted three of the cases in which lenders that said they were acting as trustee for securitized mortgages sought foreclosure. In June, Schack dismissed two cases filed by a unit of Wells Fargo & Co. after doing his own online public-records search and finding the company didn’t own the loans.
In another case, Schack dismissed an action by a unit of HSBC Holdings, noting that court filings listed the same Florida address for HSBC and a loan collector—the same address that had also been listed by other banks in court filings.
"The court ponders if Suite 100 is the size of Madison Square Garden to house all of these financial behemoths or if there is a more nefarious reason for this corporate togetherness," he wrote in his decision.
Schack explained his motivation to the Times. “If you are going to take away somebody’s house, you have to do it the right way,” he said. “You have to have due process, and the law has to be followed.”
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Comments
Posted by Nye Lavalle - 3 months, 2 weeks, 2 days, 12 hours, 22 minutes ago
Judge Schack is a brilliant jurist and one of only a handful, including Boyco et all in Ohio Fed Courts and Gordon and Logan in Florida who have meticulously torn apart the frauds and abuses of the special mortgage servicing and foreclosure bar factories insulation of who all real parties in interest to the foreclosure are as well as making sure the indispensable parties to foreclosure actions are.
For far too many years, judges have willfully ignore the bad apples and acts of many and taken away the homes and security of many Americans without the blink of an eye. Such jurists were cowards and afraid of taking on lenders and their abuses. The ignorance of such abuses fueled the subprime morass we each face today.
Each of us has lost. From our equity and value to or homes to the value of our dollar and the stocks and bonds we hold, all of us had a vested interest to protect our fellow citizens.
Thank god for Judge Schack and the Judge Boyco and others who are standing up for justice and insuring that justice is meted out in a fair and balanced manner.
Simple measure, if you come to court, come to court representing a real party in interest and make sure your hands and your client’s hands are clean and not dirty! Simple premise, but one the foreclosure bar has WILLFULLY ignored for decades now to our mutual loss!