UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS

ORATAI CULHANE,

Plaintiff,

v.

AURORA LOAN SERVICES
OF NEBRASKA,

Defendant.

EXCERPT:

Nationwide, courts are grappling with challenges to MERS’s
power to assign mortgages as well as its practice of deputizing
employees of other companies to make assignments on its behalf.
The present case is distinct only in that it is this Court’s
first encounter with MERS and with the question whether its
involvement in the origination and assignment of a mortgage loan
clouds record title to the mortgaged property. The public has an
interest in ensuring the liquidity of the mortgage market. Thus,
even if Culhane is unable to exercise her equitable right of
redemption and foreclosure of her mortgage loan is inevitable,
title must pass free of cloud and not subject to challenge in any
future action for summary process or to try title on the ground
that the foreclosure process was conducted unlawfully. See
Bevilacqua v. Rodriguez, 460 Mass. 762, 772 (2011); Bank of N.Y.
v. Bailey, 460 Mass. 327, 333-34 (2011).

[…]

Indeed, a MERS certifying officer is more akin to an Admiral in the Georgia navy or a Kentucky Colonel with benefits than he is to any genuine financial officer. In its rush to cash in on the sale of mortgage-backed securities, the MERS system supplies the thinnest possible veneer of formality and legality to the wholesale marketing of home mortgages to large institutional investors.14

 

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