Professor Alan Weinstein

On Wednesday, June 26th, C|M|LAW Professor Alan Weinstein, who is jointly appointed at CSU’s Levin College of Urban Affairs, moderated a panel and spoke at the American Planning Association’s 2012 National Planning Law Review Teleconference/Webinar. The two other speakers on the panel were Michael Allan Wolf, who holds the Richard E. Nelson Chair in Local Government Law at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law, and Dwight Merriam, a Partner in the Robinson & Cole law firm in Hartford, CT.  There were over 850 registrants for the teleconference/webinar.

The speakers discussed a number of issues, including: the Supreme Court’s ruling in Armour v. Indianapolis, 132 S.Ct. 2073 (2012), and what it means in the broader context of challenges to local government actions based on the equal protection and due process clauses of the 14th Amendment; the Court’s granting cert. in Arkansas Game & Fish Commission v. United States,  648 F.3d 1377 (Fed. Cir. 2011), an unusual physical takings claim against the federal government; and recent developments in such areas as first amendment, telecommunications, “green” building codes, beach erosion, and rent control.

In addition, Professor Weinstein contributed an entry on Zoning to the second edition of the Encyclopedia on Housing, edited by C|M|LAW/Levin Professor Dennis Keating.  (See http://cmlawfaculty.org/2012/07/25/keating-edits-encyclopedia-of-housing-moderates-panel-on-lending-and-loss-mitigation/.)

Sage has published the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Housing.  Professor of Urban Studies and Law Dennis Keating served on the editorial board for this publication and authored two of its entries, those on Displacement and Community Development Corporations.

In addition, on June 28 at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland’s 2012 Policy Summit on Housing, Human Capital, and Inequality, Professor Keating moderated the panel on “Lending and Loss Mitigation: Towards a Stronger Housing Market”.  Panelist Andrea Ghent (CUNY- Baruch College) convincingly refuted the (conservative) argument that federal affordable housing legislation was a major cause of the subprime mortgage boom that led to the housing bubble bursting.   Mary Weselcouch (NYU – Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy) analyzed determinents of the incidence of mortgage loan modification, arguing that, so far, problems continue with the federal programs and the participating lenders.   Lei Ding (Wayne State – Department of Urban Studies) analyzed loss mitigation practices by mortgage loan servicers in “soft” housing markets like Detroit. Difficulties remain with those facing foreclosure trying to get the loan servicers to respond positively, especially in a weak market like Detroit.

Professor Dennis Keating, jointly appointed by CSU’s Levin College of Urban Affairs and C|M|LAW, and C|M|LAW Clinical Professor Emeritus Kermit Lind, have co-authored “Responding to the Mortgage Crisis:  Three Cleveland Examples” in the Winter 2012 issue of The Urban Lawyer, Vol. 44, No. 1:1-135.

Keating and Lind write that years before the mortgage crisis fueled by subprime and predatory lending became a national crisis in 2008, this emerging disaster was ravaging neighborhoods in Cleveland, Ohio. Investigations that followed revealed that homeowners were being persuaded to refinance their mortgages and often to finance home repairs and amenities through predatory lending, including adjustable rate mortgages with initial low interest rates (“teaser loans”). The Cleveland neighborhood of Slavic Village was especially hard hit, with massive amounts of mortgage fraud followed by hundreds of foreclosures of borrowers resulting in housing abandonment and widespread blight. Despite these discouraging data, the three examples of responses described in this article give hope that the challenges caused by this crisis can be met and the city’s neighborhoods can be rebuilt even with a reduced population and reconfigured land uses.

The article is available at:http://www.americanbar.org/publications/urban_lawyer/2012/winter_2012.html

When a child is conceived from sexual intercourse between a married, heterosexual couple, the child has a legal father and mother. Whatever may happen thereafter, the child’s parents are legally bound to provide for their child, and if they don’t, they’re held accountable by law. But what about children created by artificial insemination? When it comes to paternity, the law is full of gray areas, resulting in many cases where children have no legal fathers.

In Papa’s Baby, C|M|LAW’s Professor Browne C. Lewis argues that the courts should take steps to insure that all children have at least two legal parents. Additionally, state legislatures should recognize that more than one class of fathers may exist and allocate paternal responsibility based, again, upon the best interest of the child. Lewis supplements her argument with concrete methods for dealing with different types of cases, including anonymous and non-anonymous sperm donors, married and unmarried women, and lesbian couples. In so doing, she first establishes different types of paternity, and then draws on these to create an expanded definition of paternity.

To order Papa’s Baby from NYU Press click here: http://nyupress.org/books/book-details.aspx?bookid=5825  or through Amazon, click here: http://www.amazon.com/Papas-Baby-Paternity-Artificial-Insemination/dp/0814738486/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1343232500&sr=1-1&keywords=papa%27s+baby