Over the course of its multi-decade existence, the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act ("RESPA") has been amended to cover many diverse yet related “real estate” subjects. In its present iteration, two provisions — sections 2605(g) and 2609 — deal with mortgage escrow accounts, with...

The rapid rise of cryptocurrencies over the last twenty years has interjected havoc into the staid field of commercial law, one long regulated by the Uniform Commercial Code (“U.C.C.” or “UCC”). Naturally, many individuals and organizations started to count their stash of...

Section 365 of the Bankruptcy Code (“Code”), which focuses on the post-petition continuation of pre-petition contractual relations, controls the assumption and rejection of executory contracts and unexpired leases by a trustee or debtor-in-possession (“DIP”) in all bankruptcy cases....

After an unexpectedly slow start, the Trump Administration's deregulatory push finally gained momentum in late 2017. In the field of student lending, this slowdown affected the Department of Education (DOE), the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and the Department of Justice (DOJ)....

When the Supreme Court (“Court”) handed down its opinions in AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion, 563 U.S. 333 (2011), the majority's holding engendered breathless (at least in legal terms) headlines. Clearly, without a smidgen of doubt on the part of arbitration's opponents and proponents, five...

With debts rising faster than new graduates' starting salaries, a student debt crisis has the potential to haunt the nation much in the way the mortgage crisis did ten years ago. Beginning in 2016, a new mood dampened the federal bureaucracy's regulatory pace. The DOE, led by Secretary Elisabeth...

Enjoying an “uneasy coexistence,” the United Nations Convention on the International Sale of Goods (“CISG”) and the Uniform Commercial Code (“UCC”) converge in some details. Yet, regardless of their many similarities, CISG and the UCC are not wholly alike in certain key requirements...

Since 1978, dismissals of involuntary bankruptcy petitions due to petitioning creditors' bad faith have proliferated. In the process, a textual oddity has not gone unnoticed: even as “bad faith” is denominated as the basis for an award of punitive damages, nowhere in the Bankruptcy Code's...

In 2015, the interpretive tranquility that had come to typify the jurisprudence surrounding one of the most well-rooted hearsay exceptions — the business records one (“BRE”) — was ruptured. In that year, in Sierra Managed Asset Plan, LLC v. Hale (“Hale”) and Unifund CCR LLC v. Dear...