2015

Rejecting a contrary Federal Reserve Board regulation and cases thereunder, the Eighth Circuit U.S.
Court of Appeals has held that it does not violate the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (15 U.S.C. § 1691 et seq.)
(ECOA) for a lender to require wives to guarantee debts of their husbands’ businesses.

The common intent to benefit friendly creditors by not listing them in one’s bankruptcy papers is sufficient intent to support denial of a bankruptcy discharge, the Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals has ruled.

It’s a curious practice: Foreclosure plaintiffs file a complaint seeking a personal deficiency judgment against the mortgagor, but provide in the order confirming sale that the deficiency judgment is “in rem”. In rem, of course, means that the judgment is against the thing – the property which, by the terms of the order of confirmation, is transferred to the purchaser at the foreclosure sale (or its assignee).

Contractual ambiguity may allow consideration of extrinsic evidence to clarify those portions of “integrated” contracts that are unclear, but it does not open the flood gates for consideration of parol evidence on other points or to establish entirely new terms.

Three attempts to serve process at approximately the same hour over a four-day period do not “demonstrate a well-directed effort to ascertain the whereabouts of defendant by inquiry ‘as full as circumstances permit’” and hence fail the law’s preconditions for resort to publication service, a panel of the Appellate Court in Chicago has ruled.