New Jersey’s Model Response to Predatory Lending

As widespread media coverage has documented, predatory home lending practices have become rampant throughout the country and, notably, among low-and moderate-income and African American communities in New Jersey. Our article analyzes this emerging problem as a sometimes devastating side effect of the rapid increase in American home ownership, an otherwise almost completely desirable phenomenon. Because predatory lending has been so difficult to define, states have struggled to regulate it. New Jersey, building on the work of a few other leading states, has drafted what many consider to be the new standard for predatory lending legislation, the Home Ownership Security Act. Our article places the Act in the context of governing federal law and industry practice. Such legislation is, however, quite complex and the product of significant legislative compromise, resulting in certain ambiguities that our article documents and seeks to resolve. Our article will help the relatively new scholarly debate regarding predatory lending to move forward by highlighting the inherent tension between increasing consumer protections and preserving vibrant consumer credit markets. We conclude that while the Act achieves a reasonable balance between the two goals, it could have gone even farther in promoting consumer protection interests. Our article also will be a definitive resource for attorneys and judges as they attempt to understand and employ this complicated and extraordinarily important law

On the Birth of Isolas

Isolas are isolated, closed curves of solution branches of nonlinear problems. They have been observed to occur in the buckling of elastic shells, the equilibrium states of chemical reactors and other problems. In this paper we present a theory to describe analytically the structure of a class of isolas. Specifically, we consider isolas that shrink to a point as a parameter τ of the problem, approaches a critical value τ_0. The point is referred to as an isola center. Equations that characterize the isola centers are given. Then solutions are constructed in a neighborhood of the isola centers by perturbation expansions in a small parameter ε that is proportional to (τ-τo), with a appropriately determined. The theory is applied to a chemical reactor problem

Chronicles as Revisionist Religious History

Chronicles takes history and reconstructs it to make it more acceptable in terms of its time and place. The Chronicler writes a form of revisionist religious history, to revitalize, reinvigorate, and renew Judaism for the returning exiles from Babylon and their descendants. Chronicles is selective history. The Chronicler understands that Moses created the nation of Israel from a group of slaves, and that David created a dynastic monarchic system of government. By the time Chronicles is written, that system was gone and what replaces it is a religion based on the Temple, the cultus and the attendant Levitical personnel

Sociology in Law Enforcement

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/50806/1/21.pd