Semester: Spring 2023 (tentative) Fall 2022 Summer 2022 Spring 2022 Fall 2021 Summer 2021 Spring 2021 Fall 2020 Spring 2020 Fall 2019 Summer 2019 Spring 2019
Professional/Experiential Skills Courses First Year Courses Only

Advocacy and the DC Foreclosure Crisis (LAW-992-001)
Bennett, B. Williams

Notices

Description

The full title of this seminar is Multidisciplinary Approaches to Social Justice: Addressing the Residential Foreclosure Crisis in Washington, D.C. The social science of anthropology and the profession of law differ in research methods and pedagogy, but concur in regarding the persistence of social injustice as a proper focus of attention. The seminar will highlight one significant problem – the residential foreclosure crisis - as a vehicle to expose students to cross-disciplinary methods of research, forms of work product, and styles of presentation. Through reading, discussion and the completion of projects, students will learn how practitioners of each discipline perceive and address injustice. In doing so, they will gain greater understanding of their own discipline’s pre-conceptions, potential and limitations. The seminar is cross-listed as an offering in the Anthropology Department of AU's College of Arts and Sciences, and is open to ten J.D. students and ten graduate students in Anthropology.

The seminar will address the legal and institutional underpinnings of predatory lending, the securitization of mortgage products, and the historical absence of credit in poor communities. It will also engage students with members of the communities affected by foreclosure – homeowners, renters, advocates, housing counselors, elected officials, judges, and others – in defining the extent of the problem in identified neighborhoods in the District and in formulating how students can turn their disciplines’ tools to the most productive use. Students will work in teams composed of JD and graduate students on several projects:

• door-to-door outreach to residents who have received notices of their lenders’ intent to foreclose, to inform residents of their rights and to interview them to gain a better understanding of the impacts of foreclosure on individuals, families and neighborhoods.
• legislative advocacy: working in a coalition to monitor and amend the Savings Homes D.C. Homes from Foreclosure Amendment Act of 2010, which imposes mandatory mediation on lenders who are seeking to foreclose. The District is one of 27 “non-judicial foreclosure” jurisdictions, meaning that there is no court review of the accuracy or sufficiency of a lender’s claim that a borrower has defaulted.
• staffing and following up on the Founders’ Day Program, Housing Justice in the Nation’s Capitol: Strategies to Preserve Homes and Neighborhoods during the Foreclosure Crisis, a half day workshop convening advocates to formulate plans for addressing the short and long term effects of foreclosures.

Other projects will be proposed, and students may also develop their own. The seminar will be available for completion of the upper level writing requirement.

Please contact Susan Bennett, at sbennet@wcl.american.edu, for more information.

Textbooks and Other Materials

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First Class Readings

Not available at this time.

Syllabus

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