New York Times Profiles Brooklyn Trial Judge Known For Holding Lenders' Feet To The Fire When Seeking Mortgage Foreclosure

The New York Times recently ran a profile on Brooklyn, New York trial judge Arthur M. Schack, a jurist who has developed a reputation for being a thorn in the side of those foreclosing lenders and their attorneys who, in cases over which he presides, persist on filing court papers that are filled with errors and omissions, and who otherwise come to court unprepared to prove that they actually own the promissory note secured by the mortgage they seek to foreclose.

• [Justice Schack] 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.

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• Justice Schack, like a handful of state and federal judges, has taken a magnifying glass to the mortgage industry. In the gilded haste of the past decade, bankers handed out millions of mortgages — with terms good, bad and exotically ugly — then repackaged those loans for sale to investors from Connecticut to Singapore. Sloppiness reigned. So many papers have been lost, signatures misplaced and documents dated inaccurately that it is often not clear which bank owns the mortgage. Justice Schack’s take is straightforward, and sends a tremor through some bank suites: If a bank cannot prove ownership, it cannot foreclose.

For more, see A ‘Little Judge’ Who Rejects Foreclosures, Brooklyn Style.

In a somewhat related story, see New York Magazine: Brooklyn Judge’s Influences Include Obscure Bruce Willis Movies.

For an earlier post on Justice Schack, with links to over 30 of his court rulings in which he bounced unprepared foreclosing lenders and their lawyers out of his courtroom, see Brooklyn Trial Judge Nixes "Rubber Stamp Method" Of Adjudicating Foreclosures; Lenders, Lawyers Lacking Legal Standing To Bring Actions Get Bounced.