Mortgage Symposium at Pepperdine

On Friday, Pepperdine University School of Law is hosting a symposium entitled, "Bringing Down the Curtain on the Current Mortgage Crisis and Preventing a Return Engagement." As the announcement notes, the Pepperdine Law Review is bringing top scholars and Bob Lawless to campus. OK, it doesn't actually say that explicitly, but I've always wanted such an announcement to say something like that. Besides myself, the speakers include Ann Burkhart, Rick Caruso, Deborah Dakin, Wilson Freyermuth, Sam Gerdano, Melissa Jacoby, Alex M. Johnson, Jr., Timothy Mayopoulos, Grant Nelson, Mark Scarberry, and Dale Whitman. Truly trivial question: which four were once colleagues at the University of Missouri School of Law?

The papers will be published in the Pepperdine Law Review. My contribution has been co-authored by my research assistant extraordinaire, Jeff Paulsen. Before he goes off for a two-year clerkship with Judge Jack Schmetterer in the bankruptcy court in Chicago, I wanted to take advantage of his talent work with Jeff on a scholarly piece. We have a working title of "The Missing History of Bankruptcy Mortgage Modification." The short version is that the current rule against modifying mortgages in bankruptcy is not the considered policy choice as it is often portrayed. Rather, like many things, the history is much messier, and path dependence explains a lot of it. When we have a version for SSRN, I'll post a more detailed summary.