October 16, 2026
I am excited to speak at at Yale Law School’s Access & Accountability 2026: Restoring Accountability & the Rule of Law conference next week:
The Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic and the Abrams Institute for Freedom of Expression annually bring together transparency advocates of all stripes to identify current impediments to government openness and to develop strategies for addressing them. Law school clinicians from around the country, together with investigative journalists, academics, practicing lawyers, and law students, explore some of the most urgent transparency issues in the areas of law enforcement, national security and surveillance, government data and personal privacy, and newsgathering rights. The conference is designed to facilitate the development of ongoing relationships, cooperation, and collaboration among practitioners, journalists, and law school faculties to promote governmental accountability and transparency.
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and William Eskridge (Yale) will discuss “the current state of the Court, recent criticism of its rulings and the procedures sometimes used to reach them, and the troubling decline in the public’s confidence in the Court.”
My panel will focus on the role of AI in clinical legal education. It will be moderated by Marisol Orihuela (Yale) and the other panelists are Bob Ambrogi (LawNext); Patrick Barry (Michigan) and Lisa Hoppenjans (Wash U.).
The full list of speaker bios for the two-day event is here. Looking forward to it!
October 16, 2026 | Permalink | No Comments
October 15, 2026
I was happy to present on a recent “Deed in a Box” case (more on that below) at the American College of Mortgage Attorneys annual meeting on the Professors’ Panel along with
Professor Bender explained that Vargas v. RRA CP Opportunity Trust 1 (Wash. 2026), now under reconsideration, could limit nonjudicial foreclosure to holders of negotiable instruments, which would push lenders on HELOCs and most commercial loans toward receiverships and mezzanine structures and expose similar “holder” statutes in other states.
Professor Freyermuth provided an update on the Restatement (Fourth) of Property (for which he is an Associate Reporter). The Restatement 4th will, for the first time, address when a long delay in a foreclosure operates to time-bar the right to foreclose.
Professor Forrester Rogers previewed the Uniform Law Commission’s draft Deed Fraud Act (for which she is the Reporter), which pairs prevention tools (owner notification, title freezes, a known-filer program, and notarial verification) with an expedited court proceeding to void fraudulent deeds and mortgages.
Deed in a Box
My presentation focused on Shanghai Commercial Bank Ltd., New York Branch v. New Tent, LLC, No. 850240/2024 (Sup. Ct. N.Y. Cnty. June 13, 2026), in which Justice Masley of the Commercial Division held that a deed in lieu of foreclosure delivered as consideration for a forbearance agreement is a mortgage under Real Property Law § 320. The decision appears to be the first in New York to hold this expressly in the forbearance context.
The facts will be familiar to anyone who has worked out a troubled loan. The lenders had made about $75 million in loans secured by a mortgage on 335 West 35th Street in Manhattan. After the borrowers defaulted, the parties signed a forbearance agreement. In exchange for the forbearance, the borrowers delivered a conveyance in lieu of foreclosure that would take effect if the loan was not repaid by the end of the forbearance period. The agreement said the conveyance was absolute “in fact as well as in form” and was not intended as a mortgage or security instrument. The borrowers did not pay and then refused to cooperate with recording, so the lenders sued.
The court’s reasoning follows a long line of New York cases, including Basile, Leonia Bank, Patmos, and RTT Holdings. Those cases hold that a deed given to secure a debt creates only a mortgage, however it is labeled. Here the conveyance was given in exchange for forbearance on an existing, defaulted obligation, so it functioned as security for the debt, and the disclaimer could not change that.
The practical lesson is that a deed in lieu is not a shortcut around a NY foreclosure in a forbearance deal. Lenders who want speed should consider other tools, although they have their own limitations: a consent judgment of foreclosure, an accommodation pledge of the borrower’s equity interests that can be enforced through a UCC sale, or an assignment in lieu of the membership interests. The lenders have appealed to the First Department, so there may be further developments regarding the “deed in a box” in New York.
October 15, 2026 | Permalink | No Comments
October 13, 2026
By AramilFeraxa – Own work, CC BY 4.0
The Wall Street Journal quoted me in The Luxury Beverly Hills Condo Project Borrowing Money From Its Future Residents (behind a paywall). It opens,
The developer behind one of the country’s most expensive real-estate projects has an unusual request for its condo buyers: Lend us money.
Purchasers of the site’s roughly 150 condo units are also providing debt to help Cain, an investment firm based in London, fund its $10 billion project, known as One Beverly Hills.
The 17.5-acre site, set to be completed in 2029, will include high-end retail such as Dolce & Gabbana, upscale dining, 78 new hotel suites and acres of botanical gardens. The ultraluxury condos will be operated by Aman, one of the world’s leading high-end hotel operators.
The condo owners’ debt takes the form of a bond—the developers call them Founder Bonds—and buyers will receive a return of 5%, according to a person familiar with the matter.
No condo buyers are forced to participate in the bond program. Founder Bonds offer a financial return and the opportunity to assist in the construction of their future home, Cain has told condo buyers.
When the Founder Bond program was launched early last year, 10-year Treasury debt offered less than 5% returns. In recent weeks, however, the 10-year yield has exceeded that level, rising above 5.3% at one point this month. That means Founder Bond holders are now earning less than the yield on Treasurys, which are commonly considered the “risk-free” rate.
But some say this rarely seen financing tool sticks condo buyers with a risk.
The bonds are junior to other debt on the project, which includes a $2.8 billion senior loan led by J.P. Morgan and a $1.5 billion mezzanine loan from VICI Properties. Parts of both loans are conditional on Cain hitting certain sales milestones.
That means that if the condo towers were to fall short of completion—in a city where most luxury buyers are focused on single-family homes and estates—bondholders could be left not only without the penthouse they were expecting, but also without the extra money lent to the developers.
“Even though these are luxury buyers, I would guess they’re going to face more exposure if the project goes bust than they may realize,” said David Reiss, a professor at Cornell Law School, who researches real-estate finance. “They’re getting paid a small amount to take a large amount of risk…but because they’re luxury, they may be able to tolerate the risk better.”
October 13, 2026 | Permalink | No Comments
September 30, 2026
I will be opening this gathering (confirmed speakers are listed here as well). It will cover the following topics:
Kick-off
What’s actually possible with legal AI today, and what’s still on the horizon? This opening presentation offers a grounded overview of the current state of generative AI for legal applications — how foundation models are evolving, which breakthroughs matter most for legal work, and where the technology still falls short. Attendees leave with a clear-eyed understanding of AI’s capabilities and its limits.
Keynote
Two fireside-style keynote Q&As punctuate the day — candid, on-stage conversations with leaders shaping the intersection of law and AI. Speakers will be announced closer to the event.
Panel discussion
What do in-house leaders actually want from AI-enabled law firms? Hear directly from the people buying legal services about their expectations for outside counsel. Are they demanding AI-driven efficiencies? Do they trust AI-assisted work product? How are they weighing a firm’s AI capabilities in pitches and panels? This session surfaces the client voice and helps firms understand where the market is heading.
Panel discussion
The legal team of 2029 may prove a meaningful departure from today’s. As AI absorbs the junior work that once filled the ranks and sustained the billable hour, teams are adding engineers and other AI specialists in their place. Alongside this, what that team can actually do turns increasingly on access to frontier models, compute, and data. This session convenes leaders rethinking who sits on the legal team, how their work should be priced, and whether frontier technology will continue to be available to lawyers across markets.
Debate
Before a tribunal of three judges, the proposition will argue that legal teams should own the application layer: tailored legal AI, built either from the ground up or on an open-source foundation. The opposition will argue that the better course for a primary tool is a commercial legal AI platform, however customized.
September 30, 2026 | Permalink | No Comments
September 10, 2026
It was a privilege to present on Access to Justice via Tech to a distinguished delegation from Thailand’s legal community during their visit to Cornell Tech. Judge Napakamol Havanond Sawangchaeng (Cornell LL.M. ’16) also presented on Technology, Courts, and Access to Justice: Thailand’s Journey Toward a More Inclusive Judicial System. It was a wonderful exchange of ideas.
Other members of the delegation included The Honorable Chief Justice Adisak Tantiwong, President of the Supreme Court of Thailand and President of the Thai Bar, and Professor Dr. Kittipong Kittayarak (Cornell LL.M. ’83), Chairman of the Board of the Thailand Institute of Justice (TIJ), along with colleagues from the Thai Supreme Court, the Thai Bar, and TIJ.
As Matt D’Amore, our convener, noted in his earlier post, the visit to Cornell Tech capped a broader trip to Cornell centered on remembering the life and legacy of Her Royal Highness Princess Bajrakitiyabha (Cornell LL.M. ’02, J.S.D. ’05), whose years here helped anchor a lasting relationship between our two countries’ legal communities.
I found our discussion of how legal AI tools can help people access courts and shrink the justice gap on both sides of the Pacific particularly interesting. We also learned about TIJ’s “people-centered justice” framework, which puts technology in the service of accessible justice.
Cornell colleagues Greg Morrisett, Frank Pasquale, James Grimmelmann, Sateesh Nori, Jane Swanson, İrem Tümer, Maximilian Paterson, and Nate Schorr all helped make it a particularly fruitful exchange.
September 10, 2026 | Permalink | No Comments
September 9, 2026
I am excited that Who Controls the Block? How States Can Regulate Tokenized Residential Real Estate (co-authored with Bizub & Peralta) is forthcoming in the Texas A&M Law Review. The abstract reads,
In July 2025, the City of Detroit filed a major nuisance abatement action against RealT, a fintech that had sold blockchain-based fractional interests in more than four hundred Detroit rental properties to some 22,000 investors around the world. Within a year, a court had ordered the company’s rents into escrow, the company had conceded to its investors that its “model no longer works,” and it had announced the liquidation of its portfolio — leaving tenants without basic services and token holders facing steep losses.
This article uses the rise and collapse of RealT, together with case studies of the other leading real estate tokenization business models, to evaluate the claims made for tokenized real estate as a new asset class for individual investors. Measured against the publicly-traded REIT, tokenization offers only one advantage to investors — a bespoke level of diversification — and it does so while shedding the investor protections that registration and exchange listing provide. More fundamentally, the leading business models rest on skirting the state and local legal infrastructure of real property: recording regimes, transfer and property taxation, and homeowner and tenant protections. Like the mortgage industry’s Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc. (“MERS”) a generation ago, tokenization externalizes the costs of that end-run onto the parties least able to bear them.
Real estate tokenization is still in its infancy, and state and local governments have a window of opportunity to shape how these fintechs operate within their borders. Some have begun to use it: Maine’s first-in-the-nation statute regulating shared appreciation agreements supplies one template, and Detroit’s enforcement campaign another. This article maps the gaps that remain — most notably in transfer taxation and tenant protection — and offers an agenda for closing them before tokenization scales.
September 9, 2026 | Permalink | No Comments
August 18, 2026
I was quoted in At Brooklyn Navy Yard, Mamdani’s Jobs Agenda Collides with His Anti-ICE Politics. It reads, in part,
… BNYDC’s leases generally do not give the corporation authority to govern a tenant’s customers or what those customers do with products they purchase.
Asked specifically whether Crye had come up in her conversations with Mamdani, Greene said it had not.
A City Hall source similarly said the Mayor’s Office does not get involved in individual Navy Yard leases and that evictions may only take place when tenants violate contractual requirements such as financial obligations, legal compliance or permitted uses.
However, Council Member Shekar Krishnan, chair of the Council’s Oversight and Investigations Committee, said public ownership should change the equation.
“Public land like the Navy Yard should not be doing business with companies that dress ICE officers and support ripping families apart,” Krishnan said, adding that he was exploring “all tools at our disposal to keep public land away from ICE operations.”
Asked what those tools could include, his office said it was still exploring its options.
Cornell Law School clinical professor David Reiss, a real estate law expert, who reviewed two other Navy Yard leases and BNYDC’s bylaws but not Crye’s private agreement, told amNewYork that the legal options may look very different depending on whether Crye is still in the middle of a lease or seeking another term.
“Based on other Navy Yard leases I have reviewed — not Crye’s own, which I have not seen — Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation leases can only be terminated for specific things like nonpayment, misuse of the space, or sanctions-list status, not because of who a tenant’s customers are or how they use a tenant’s products,” Reiss said.
“Lease renewal is a different question,” he added. “Landlords generally have much broader discretion about whether to keep renting to a tenant once a lease has fully run its course.”
Reiss said BNYDC would likely have broad discretion not to renew Crye, unless the company has an unexercised option giving it a contractual right to another term. A nonrenewal could still draw a lawsuit.
“Crye might argue the decision was arbitrary and capricious or exceeded BNYDC’s corporate authority under state law,” Reiss said. Federal constitutional claims involving retaliation, viewpoint discrimination or equal protection, he added, “could face significant doctrinal hurdles on these facts.”
That makes the terms of Crye’s lease, and who sits on BNYDC’s board when a renewal decision arrives, central to what happens next.
BNYDC’s bylaws allow the mayor to appoint up to 29 members, including as many as 25 discretionary appointees who serve at the mayor’s pleasure. The mayor may also remove members with or without cause.
Reiss said that structure gives Mamdani “real leverage” over such decisions even though BNYDC itself is the landlord.
August 18, 2026 | Permalink | No Comments
