MERS, the mortgage industry’s self-serving creation launched without due regard for all 50 states’ laws, faces a big test in Washington state. The Washington Supreme Court will decide whether MERS’s business model of being named beneficiary on deeds of trust (mortgages) is legal. If the Court decides MERS doesn’t work under Washington law, the Court may also address the consequences of MERS’s illegality on foreclosures, and consider whether homeowners have the right to sue MERS.
TO: John O’Brien
Register of Deeds Southern Essex County, Commonwealth of Massachusetts
FROM: Jamie Ranney, Esq.
Jamie Ranney, PC
4 Thirty Acres Lane
Nantucket, MA 02554
508.228.9224 (tel)
508.228-4752 (fax)
DATE: June 18, 2011
RE: Legal authority of Registers of Deeds in Massachusetts to reject document(s) and/or instrument(s) for recording in their registries
QUESTION PRESENTED
What legal authority does a Register of Deeds in Massachusetts have to reject for recording (unregistered land) or registration (Land Court registered land) document(s) and/or instrument(s) in his Registry and where is such legal authority derived from?
SUMMARY
It is without question that a Register of Deeds has an important and fiduciary relationship and responsibility – especially in the Commonwealth where his position is elected – to all of his constituents, as well as to the public at large, all of whom rely and who should be able to rely on the Register’s efforts, supervision, and oversight in assuring, maintaining and promoting the integrity, transparency, accuracy, and consistency of a County’s land records.
The Register’s work and supervision of his registry most often revolves around tasks and responsibilities that are generally ministerial in nature. The Register is typically concerned with the daily task of recording of legal document(s) and/or instrument(s) affecting real property where such document(s) and/or instrument(s) are properly presented to the registry for recording on the public land records.
However, the Register’s fiduciary duty goes well beyond these usual ministerial acts in circumstances where the Register has actual knowledge or a subjective good-faith belief/basis for believing that document(s) and/or instrument(s) being presented for recording or registration in the registry for which he has responsibility are fraudulent or otherwise not executed or acknowledged under applicable law. In such cases the Register may lawfully refuse to record such document(s) and/or instrument(s).
Copyright (c) 2010 Pepperdine University School of Law
Pepperdine Law Review
Author: Dale A. Whitman*
The premise of this paper is that the concept of negotiability of promissory notes, which derives in modern law from Article 3 of the Uniform Commercial Code, is not only useless but positively detrimental to the operation of the modern secondary mortgage market. Therefore, the concept ought to be eliminated from the law of mortgage notes.
This is not a new idea. More than a decade ago, Professor Ronald Mann made the point that negotiability is largely irrelevant in every field of consumer and commercial payment systems, including mortgages. 1 But Mann’s article made no specific recommendations for change, and no change has occurred.
I propose here to examine the ways in which negotiability and the holder in due course doctrine of Article 3 actually impair the trading of mortgages. Doing so, I conclude that these legal principles have no practical value to the parties in the mortgage system, but that they impose significant and unnecessary costs on those parties. I conclude with a recommendation for a simple change in Article 3 that would do away with the negotiability of mortgage notes.
I. The Secondary Mortgage Market
In this era, it is a relatively rare mortgage that is held in portfolio for its full term by the originating lender. Instead, the vast majority of mortgages are either traded on the secondary market to an investor who will hold them, 2 or to an issuer (commonly an investment banker) who will securitize them. Securitization …
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