All legal posts: October 2008 Archives
About a year and a half ago I wrote a post on my old blog, "Law Crossing: yay or nay?" asking if it was worth signing up with Law Crossing to help me find a job.
The answer is clearly, most definitely and unequivocally, "nay." For the reasons laid out below, Law Crossing has demonstrated itself to be a most disreputable company, first by engaging in dubious business practices and then by trying to co-opt me and my blog in its efforts to cover them up and continue to exploit the public.
Yesterday Berkeley played host to the annual Students for Free Culture conference. (Actually, the "unconference" continues today with further workshops.) Although I am a frequent attendee at all sorts of law and technology events, this one was fairly unique: instead of being a room stuffed with lawyers, it was full of artists and technologists, and lots and lots of concerned students.
For reasons I never could quite understand, mortgages are heavily tested on the bar exam, usually constituting at least a third of the property questions on the MBE. While I did learn the rules sufficiently to pass the test, my eyes always glazed over at the thought of them. I just couldn't care about the technicalities of financial instruments; I cared about people.
Even in this current crisis, my view is the same. The technicalities of financial instruments still strike me as mind-numbingly arcane, but to the extent to they affect real people, real lives, and real homes, well, in that respect they are incredibly relevant.
However, it's this dichotomy about mortgages that seems to be at the root of our current problem. And standing away of its solution.
On the one hand, mortgages are technical and often complicated financial instruments. Bought and sold, underwritten and recalled, mortgages are entirely pecuniary in character and exclusively of the realm of banking and finance experts.
But as long as they are regarded merely as mechanisms of investment, they will fail as mechanisms of investment. For doing so ignores their other dimension: as necessary tools to get people into homes.
I think I will continue my inadvertent yet somewhat purposeful avoidance of discussing the presidential debates. There are plenty of other people out there who are writing pretty much what I would say, and I don't want to post what would essentially be a "me, too."
But I do want to note something John McCain said tonight that resonated with me. Mind you, little he says ever does, but at one point he expressed something cogently that tracked to a frustration I'd already experienced: that it is so difficult to transport one's health coverage across state lines.
I took over an hour this morning to figure out what to vote for this November. I already pretty much know whom to vote for, but my November ballot will be covered with state and local propositions, and they take a while to work through.
It is a quirk of the California constitution that there are so many separate ballot measures each election cycle. I'm not, however, sure it's an altogether good quirk. On the one hand, direct democracy certainly sounds like a good idea, at least in theory. Let the people speak directly on the laws that govern them, rather than have to depend on some cadre of representatives make those decisions for them.
But in practice some of the same problems that infect the republican representative-based legislative process also infect the democratic public referendum process, and the latter introduces several new ones of its own. As I worked my way through the dozen state initiatives I am to vote on next month, I became acutely aware of them.
