The Call For Home Mortgage Modification Rights In Bankruptcy Proceedings Continues

The Honorable J. Rich Leonard, a jurist who currently toils in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, recently wrote in The Washington Post advocating for a change in the cuurrent bankruptcy law to allow for the modification of troubled home mortgages in bankruptcy proceedings. In his article, Judge Leonard reminds us of the following:

• [H]omeowners are the only ones who cannot modify the terms of their secured debts in bankruptcy. Corporate America flocks to bankruptcy courts to do precisely this -- to restructure and reamortize loans whose conditions they find onerous or can no longer meet. Airlines are still flying and auto parts makers still operating because they have used this powerful tool of the bankruptcy process. Lehman Brothers will surely invoke it.

• But when the bankruptcy code was adopted in 1979, the mortgage industry persuaded Congress that its market was so tightly regulated and conservatively run that it should be exempted from the general bankruptcy rules permitting modification.

For more, see Give bankruptcy judges the power to alter mortgages.

For a similar position espoused by the Honorable Keith M. Lundin, a judge in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Middle District of Tennessee, see:

• The Tennessean: Homeowner help may lie in bankruptcy courts (Chapter 13 modification could fend off foreclosures).