Caroline Joan S. Picart & Marlowe Fox
ABSTRACT
Florida’s Fair Foreclosure Act, House Bill 87 (“HB 87”), is a legislative enactment that expedites the foreclosure process in Florida. The rationale is simple: the sooner the foreclosure mess is cleaned up, the sooner the housing market and economy can recover. Despite the idea’s inherent soundness, HB 87 makes assumptions that will lead to unintended consequences.
This Article analyzes HB 87 in terms of its constituent elements and, through legal reasoning, deduces the legal rights and duties created thereby. We then use the rights and duties created by HB 87 as a premise to infer the competing policies behind HB 87’s rationale. Lastly, this Article attempts an economic analysis of HB 87’s rationale to determine if its pragmatic effects are consistent therewith.
This Article concludes that the uncertain consequences of the mortgage foreclosure crisis are best mitigated by affording the time inherent in the legal process and maintaining the elasticity of courts to make judgments based on interpretative case law and equity.
preferred citation: Caroline Joan S. Picart & Marlowe Fox, Assumptions and Unintended Consequences of Florida’s HB 87 and the Foreclosure Crisis: A Pragmatic Analysis, 119 Penn St. L. Rev. 93 (2014).