The Paper Chase: Securitization, Foreclosure, and the Uncertainty of Mortgage Title

The mortgage foreclosure crisis raises legal questions as important as its economic impact. Questions that were straightforward and uncontroversial a generation ago today threaten the stability of a $13 trillion mortgage market: Who has standing to foreclose? If a foreclosure was done improperly, what is the effect? And what is the proper legal method for transferring mortgages? These questions implicate the clarity of title for property nationwide and pose a too-big-to-fail problem for the courts. The legal confusion stems from the existence of competing systems for establishing title to mortgages and transferring those rights. Historically, mortgage title was established and transferred through the public demonstration regimes of UCC Article 3 and land recordation systems. This arrangement worked satisfactorily when mortgages were rarely transferred. Mortgage finance, however, shifted to securitization, which involves repeated bulk transfers of mortgages. To facilitate securitization, deal architects developed alternative contracting regimes for mortgage title: UCC Article 9 and MERS, a private mortgage registry. These new regimes reduced the cost of securitization by dispensing with demonstrative formalities, but at the expense of reduced clarity of title, which raised the costs of mortgage enforcement. This trade-off benefitted the securitization industry at the expense of securitization investors because it became apparent only subsequently with the rise in mortgage foreclosures. The harm, however, has not been limited to securitization investors. Clouded mortgage title has significant negative externalities on the economy as a whole. This Article proposes reconciling the competing title systems through an integrated system of note registration and mortgage recordation, with compliance as a prerequisite to foreclosure. Such a system would resolve questions about standing, remove the potential cloud to real-estate title, and facilitate mortgage financing by clarifying property rights

The Relevance of Relevance: Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act and the NSA Metadata Collection Program

In June 2013, a National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, Edward Snowden, leaked classified documents exposing a number of secret government programs. Among these programs was the “telephony metadata” collection program under which the government collects records from phone companies containing call record data for nearly every American. News of this program created considerable controversy and led to a wave of litigation contesting the validity of the program. The legality of the metadata collection program has been challenged on both constitutional and statutory grounds. The program derives its authority from Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, codified as 50 U.S.C. § 1861. The statute requires that there be reasonable grounds to believe the data collected is “relevant to an authorized investigation.” The government deems all these records “relevant” based on the fact that they are used to find patterns and connections in preventing terrorist activity. Critics of the program, however, assert that billions of records cannot possibly be relevant when a negligible portion of those records are actually linked to terrorist activity. This Note examines the conflicting interpretations of “relevant,” and concludes that while the current state of the law permits bulk data collection, the power of the NSA to collect records on such a large scale must be reined in

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Blockchain Technology: An Interconnected Legal Framework for an Interconnected System

In 2018, someone hiding behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin, the first decentralized cryptocurrency operating without a central bank or authority. However, the true revolution seems to be its underlying technology; blockchain. Today, a lot of discussion is taking place around the legal issues of this nascent technology. This paper focuses on blockchain and the law. After exploring blockchain’s basic features, it will propose an international regulatory framework suitable for this technology’s characteristics and its borderless nature

Blockchain Technology: An Interconnected Legal Framework for an Interconnected System

In 2018, someone hiding behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin, the first decentralized cryptocurrency operating without a central bank or authority. However, the true revolution seems to be its underlying technology; blockchain. Today, a lot of discussion is taking place around the legal issues of this nascent technology. This paper focuses on blockchain and the law. After exploring blockchain’s basic features, it will propose an international regulatory framework suitable for this technology’s characteristics and its borderless nature

ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks: a literature review

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation is a complex and vibrant process, one that involves a combination of technological and organizational interactions. Often an ERP implementation project is the single largest IT project that an organization has ever launched and requires a mutual fit of system and organization. Also the concept of an ERP implementation supporting business processes across many different departments is not a generic, rigid and uniform concept and depends on variety of factors. As a result, the issues addressing the ERP implementation process have been one of the major concerns in industry. Therefore ERP implementation receives attention from practitioners and scholars and both, business as well as academic literature is abundant and not always very conclusive or coherent. However, research on ERP systems so far has been mainly focused on diffusion, use and impact issues. Less attention has been given to the methods used during the configuration and the implementation of ERP systems, even though they are commonly used in practice, they still remain largely unexplored and undocumented in Information Systems research. So, the academic relevance of this research is the contribution to the existing body of scientific knowledge. An annotated brief literature review is done in order to evaluate the current state of the existing academic literature. The purpose is to present a systematic overview of relevant ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks as a desire for achieving a better taxonomy of ERP implementation methodologies. This paper is useful to researchers who are interested in ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Results will serve as an input for a classification of the existing ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Also, this paper aims also at the professional ERP community involved in the process of ERP implementation by promoting a better understanding of ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks, its variety and history