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Judge rejects foreclosures
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of New York Times
Posted: September 5th, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/nyregion/31judge.html
Every week, the nations mightiest banks come to his court seeking to take the homes of New Yorkers who cannot pay their mortgages. And nearly as often, the judge says, they file foreclosure papers speckled with errors. He plucks out one motion and leafs through: a Deutsche Bank representative signed an affidavit claiming to be the vice president of two different banks. His office was in Kansas City, Mo., but the signature was notarized in Texas. And the bank did not even own the mortgage when it began to foreclose on the homeowner. Im a little guy in Brooklyn who doesnt belong to their country clubs, what can I tell you? he says, adding a shrug for punctuation. I wont accept their comedy of errors. The judge, Arthur M. Schack, 64, fashions himself a judicial Don Quixote, tilting at the phalanxes of bankers, foreclosure facilitators and lawyers who file motions by the bale. He has tossed out 46 of the 102 foreclosure motions that have come before him in the last two years. And his often scathing decisions, peppered with allusions to the Croesus-like wealth of bank presidents, have attracted the respectful attention of judges and lawyers from Florida to Ohio to California. At recent judicial conferences in Chicago and Arizona, several panelists praised his rulings as a possible national model. Justice Schack, like a handful of state and federal judges, has taken a magnifying glass to the mortgage industry. Justice Schacks take is straightforward, and sends a tremor through some bank suites: If a bank cannot prove ownership, it cannot foreclose. If you are going to take away someones house, everything should be legal and correct, he said. Im a strange guy I dont want to put a family on the street unless its legitimate.
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