By John Minnis
Legal News
As a student at the University of Michigan in the late 1960s, Jerry Goldberg majored in protesting. He’s still at it today.
Goldberg, 60, is now an attorney specializing in helping homeowners avoid foreclosure. He knows his work is daunting.
“Nine million (foreclosure) cases. It’s going to take a lot of attorneys,” he recently told Wayne State University law students. “I enjoy being a lawyer 100 times more since I started doing these cases.”
Goldberg spoke during a lunch program sponsored by the WSU National Lawyers Guild, Black Law Students Association, Hispanic Law Students Association and the Journal of Law Society.
“Jerry Goldberg is a lawyer involved with the foreclosure Moratorium Now! movement,” said Matt Clark, a second-year law student and president of the WSU National Lawyers Guild, in introducing the speaker.
“I am a graduate of WSU Law School,” said Goldberg. “In the late 1960s, I was at the University of Michigan. I only went back to law school in 1997 and graduated from Wayne State in 2000.”
When asked what he majored in at U-M, Goldberg replied, “mostly activism.”
Between protesting at U-M and becoming a lawyer, Goldberg was a UAW autoworker. He said properties like his home in East English Village bordering Grosse Pointe on Detroit’ east side once worth $130,000 and are now selling for $12,000.
When not tilting at windmills — major mortgage lenders — out of his East Jefferson law office with attorney Venessa Fluker, Goldberg is involved with Moratorium NOW! A Coalition to Stop Foreclosures, Evictions, and Utility Shutoffs.
According to Moratorium NOW!’s website, www.moratorium-mi-org:
• One in nine homeowners nationwide is either behind in mortgage payments or is in foreclosure.
• More than 80,000 homeowners have lost their homes in the Detroit area alone.
• The vacant-home rate in Detroit is 25 percent, second only to New Orleans.
• Michigan leads the nation in foreclosures caused by sub-prime lending coupled with the severe economic downtown.
• One in every 137 homes in Michigan is in foreclosure.
• Michigan leads the country in unemployment and poverty. (Michigan’s unemployment rate is actually second in nation after Nevada.)
Moratorium NOW! was formed in the spring of 2008 to fight for the passage of Senate Bill 29, which would stop all mortgage foreclosures and evictions for two years.
Sponsored by Sen. Hansen Clarke, D-Detroit, SB 29 has languished in the Senate Committee on Banking and Financial Institutions since January.
Goldberg told students the legal basis for a foreclosure moratorium goes back to the 1930s in a U.S. Supreme Court in a Minnesota case, Home Building & Loan Assn.
v. Blaisdell, and a Michigan Supreme Court case, Russell v. Battle Creek Lumber Co.
In the aforementioned case, the high court ruled that “(t)he contract clause must be construed in harmony with the reserved power of the State to safeguard the vital interests of her people.”
In Russell, the Michigan Supreme Court sustained the validity of 1933 emergency moratorium legislation against the claim that it “violates the constitutional provision prohibiting laws impairing the obligations of contracts, in so far as it falls within the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in Home Building & Loan Ass’n v. Blaisdell.”
“It is still good law,” Goldberg said. “The right of the people to survive supersedes the right contract law in the Constitution.”
He urged students to join his cause.
“It’s really a very interesting area of the law,” he said, “because there’s not very much established in it. Great lawyers of the past did not see themselves disconnected from the struggle of regular people.”
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