In March 2009, ailing insurance giant American International Group (AIG) triggered a national outcry when it paid out $165 million in government bailout funds for employee bonus incentives.[1] President Obama called the bonus payments an “outrage” and promised that his administration would “pursue every single legal avenue to block these bonuses and make the [...]
“Sustainability,” an environmentally-friendly term that previously incited political unrest, economic uncertainty, and even emotional outrage, has become quite commonplace. In federal, state, and local agencies, sustainable practices have dominated dialogues relating to indoor air quality, water availability, energy use and production; but also growth planning and development controls, public spaces and aesthetics. Governmental entities are installing low-flow water fixtures and energy-efficient appliances, redesigning rooftops and skylines, and inviting industry and neighborhoods to the negotiation table to determine the character of future communities. Sustainability has become the vocabulary of politics and is changing those past practices that have become known as resource-wasteful, inefficient, and costly relative to human and environmental needs.
The current housing crisis has hampered the ability of financial institutions to lend and has led to dire national and global macroeconomic consequences. The credit crisis and the most recent bouts of unemployment, GDP contraction, deflation and the retrenchment of the American consumer all have their roots in the American housing sector. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that a major piece of any solution to the credit crisis must address housing issues head on. The valuations of the mortgage-backed securities that are widely held by financial firms continue to deteriorate as mortgage default rates rise. These defaults, in turn, are causing further write-downs on bank balance sheets and consequent contractions in bank lending capacity. Credit will only loosen when mortgage default rates stop increasing. Today, the most expedient means to stem this rising tide is the fast and efficient implementation of drastic and far-reaching loss mitigation techniques by the financial institutions that own or service the nation’s mortgages. Unfortunately, numerous coordination problems, including the decentralized ownership structure of the many mortgages that were privately securitized, have prevented any efforts at loss mitigation from taking hold in a fast and efficient manner. These coordination problems necessitate swift and forceful federal intervention, embodying a standardized and efficient framework for across-the-board mortgage modifications. Unfortunately, to this point, meaningful efforts toward a legislative solution have been hampered by a blind and naive adherence to the sanctity of contract and various notions of fairness.
It is time to recognize Abraham Lincoln as a principal framer of the Constitution of the United States.
The Declaration of Independence states:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. – That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . . .
No Supreme Court case created more backlash than Kelo v. City of New London, which allowed the use of eminent domain to acquire land for redevelopment. Commentators criticized, while voters and state legislatures acted to prohibit or restrict the use of eminent domain for redevelopment projects. Lost is any historical perspective, and how genetic weaknesses in the redevelopment concept provided opportunities for arguably abusive projects. Protest followed, concluding in the rejection of the Kelo decision. This article reviews the origins of urban redevelopment, and how it contributed to the backlash against the redevelopment idea.
Under the Constitution, Congress drives the federal lawmaking process. Yet every year our best new lawyers focus their competitive energies not on landing jobs with the nation’s legislature but rather on judicial clerkships and other prestigious apprenticeships with executive branch agencies, law firms, and academe.
Congress should be concerned. But it needs to understand that this demand deficit is rooted in a supply problem. Unlike the courts, agencies, firms, and academe, Congress lacks an apprenticeship program to capture the interest, harness the abilities, and shape the minds of the law’s young elite, who over the course of their careers will exert great influence on the implementation of the U.S. Code Congress writes.
For the first time in the legal literature, I here set out the full case for a congressional clerkship program analogous to that of the judiciary.
