Mortgage Certificate of Release Act. PA 93-428 attempts to allow title insurance companies to file a certificate of release after notice to the lender with an opportunity to object or cure. A title company may file a certificate of release only if it does not have notice that the lender opposes the filing.
PA 93-428 applies to mortgages and mortgage liens on one-to-four family residential real estate if the loan principal is less than $500,000.
It also amends the Mortgage Act to provide that lenders do not have to provide borrowers with certificates of release or record the releases after loan payoff if the mortgage is released by the title company under the Mortgage Certificate of Release Act.
It defines and provides a form "hold harmless letter" for title insurance companies to exchange. It replaces the current 90-day notice that the title insurer is required to provide the lender before filing a certificate of release with language allowing the title company to file releases if it has the lender's written payoff statement. It also allows a title company to rely on a hold-harmless letter from another title company that has insured the property as evidence that the mortgage(s) appearing in the chain of title have been paid off or insured over.
"There is an unfortunate tendency for many - including lawyers - to consider human rights as another discipline of law, in the same level as corporate, tax, or administrative law. This conception needs to be abandoned. Human rights is not the business of a few criminal or activist lawyers, but of the legal community as a whole without exception."
Ramon Mullerat, of Spain, chair of the International Bar Association's Human Rights Institute, in remarks to ISBA leaders in December.
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". . .Americans don't just sue big corporations or bad people. They sue doctors over misfortunes that no doctor could prevent. They sue their school officials for disciplining their children for cheating. They sue their local governments when they slip and fall on the sidewalk. . .They sue when their injuries are severe but self-inflicted, when their hurts are trivial and when they have not suffered at all."
Newsweek magazine cover story (12-15-03) titled "Lawsuit Hell: How Fear of Litigation is Paralyzing Our Professions"
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"We were seated in the center of the room to show the world that George (Ryan) was here and his friends were going to stand by him."
Former governor Jim Thompson, after dining with former governor Ryan at a popular Chicago restaurant on the eve of Ryan's first court appearance on federal corruption charges. Thompson law partner Dan Webb leads the Ryan defense team.
Editor
They called him Reverend
"His was a life of days filled with service, not of years filled with emptiness; a life of heart, not hate; a life of faith, not fear."
Those words could have been written about Paul Simon, but in fact they were written BY Paul Simon about Elijah P. Lovejoy. The martyred abolitionist newspaper editor of the Alton Observer was murdered by racists in November 1837.
Alton is in Madison County, the same neck of the woods as Troy, where Simon became a similarly fearless newspaper editor more than a century later. They were so kindred that the former senator wrote two books about Lovejoy.
We didn't know quite how to take Paul Simon when we first encountered this neophyte, 26-year-old legislator in 1955. He looked like a nerd thick lenses, cupped ears, bow tie and briefcase. His rumpled suit coat was buttoned so tightly we couldn't tell whether he had a pocket protector.
But Simon was a newspaperman, and we were University of Illinois journalism students and reporters for the Daily Illini. We wanted to know: Did the Open Meetings Act that he espoused apply to sessions of the university's board of trustees?
"Absolutely!" Rep. Simon boomed with enthusiasm in his youthful but authoritative monotone. We had a scoop, and he had our appreciation. He was as sincere an advocate of the principle, "public office is a public trust," in Springfield as he had been in Madison County.
The Troy Tribune, as a journalism study project, had a facade as bland as that of its editor. Within its jumble of typography and primitive design, however, beat a courageous heart. Simon's skirmishes against public corruption resembled Lovejoy's crusade against slavery.
Happily for Illinois and the nation, Simon did not meet the fatal fate of Lovejoy, a man against the mob. Instead, he went on to become the personification of integrity and forthrightness in the Illinois General Assembly and United States Senate during more than 40 of his 75 years.
Paul Simon acquired his pristine values from parents who had been Lutheran missionaries in China. His devout pursuit of reform as a lawmaker earned him the sobriquet of "Reverend Simon" from colleagues on both sides of the aisle in Springfield.
Had he not been hospitalized for the heart surgery that felled him Dec. 9, Paul Simon would have been thrilled by news that the governor was signing stringent ethics legislation that will restrict "business as usual" among public officials, advisers and lobbyists.
We can best hope that the spirit of Reverend Simon was at the ceremony that day, and always will be when legislatures are in session. He proved that the friendships one earns are more enduring than those one tries to buy.
The indictments and the presumptions
Not much more, nor less, need be said here about the indictment of former Illinois governor George Ryan for a litany of trespasses on the integrity of public office the 66th individual to be charged in the federal Operation Safe Road.
The dual presumptions of innocence and of not-guilty pleas will be with us again as another political tragedy prompts the national persona to impugn this otherwise great state. But let the system work for the seekers of truth and triers of fact.
Ryan's defense counsel, Dan Webb, in the requisite press conference, made the peculiar admission that the 91-page indictment is a concatenation of "innocent acts that are nothing more than the fabric of what goes on in Illinois politics and Illinois government."
Innocent at the time, perhaps, but hopefully curtailed by the recent enactment. ISBA President Terry Lavin has observed that the 2002 election, when a Democrat was elected over another Republican named Ryan, "sent a message to our elected officials that business as usual in political fund raising wasn't going to cut it anymore."
He was extolling Joe Power, who accepted the ISBA Medal of Merit at the Assembly meeting in November. Power was lauded in part for his role in exposing the licenses-for-sale scandal in the secretary of state's office years ago. His own contemptuous feelings about the ex-governor were expressed in his response.
One appropriate comment from Paul Simon was quoted in Chicago Reader by writer Jeff Balch from a letter after their chance visit last summer in Makanda. Simon lamented "droughts in intellectual ferment and compassion" in politics.
"But leadership that appeals to the noble in us, I hope will emerge one of these days and the American people will follow that, just as they will follow greed if someone appeals to greed," he wrote.
"The alternative for you and me and others is to give up. That really is no alternative," Simon concluded in a worthy valedictory.
Jeffrey Allen fills new seat in 12th Circuit
Joliet attorney J. Jeffrey Allen, chair of the ISBA Committee on Delivery of Legal Services, was installed Jan. 2 as one of two newly authorized associate judges of the 12th Circuit. The other is Edward A. Burmila Jr. They fill vacancies that have existed since December 2002.
Previously managing attorney for the Will County Legal Assistance Program for 25 years, Allen has been on the Illinois Department of Corrections legal staff since he completed an interim appointment as a circuit judge in 2002.
He also serves on the ISBA Committees on Corrections and Sentencing and on Judicial Advisory Polls, and the joint ISBA/CBA Committee on Ethics 2000.
Burmila had been a partner in Rathbun, Cservenyak & Kozol, Joliet. He was a Will County prosecutor from 1977 until 1988, when he was elected to a four-year term as state's attorney.
Allen and Burmila both graduated in 1976 from the DePaul University College of Law.
Appellate seat filled
Former state representative Mary K. O'Brien of Watseka (D-75) was appointed last month to a vacancy on the Illinois Appellate Court, 3rd District, created by the 2002 retirement of Thomas J. Homer.
O'Brien, who resigned from the General Assembly when her second child was born Dec. 17, has been a partner in O'Brien & Smith in Bradley since 2000. She had been in private practice since her graduation in 1993 from the University of Illinois College of Law.
A member of the Illinois Supreme Court Rules Committee, O'Brien chaired the House Judiciary II-Criminal Law Committee and served on the Legislative Audit Commission.
The Homer vacancy had been filled on an interim basis by Tobias G. Barry, a former appellate justice who retired in 1994. Barry resigned the appointment Nov. 30, so the Supreme Court could name a replacement, but he was immediately recalled for an indefinite period.
Recent appointments
Chicago attorney Carolyn G. Quinn was installed Dec. 4 as a judge of the Cook County Circuit Court. She fills the vacancy of Susan G. Fleming, who retired, and will serve until next Dec. 6.
A former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Mary Ann G. McMorrow and Appellate Justice Allen Hartman, Quinn was a partner in Hubert, Fowler & Quinn and former senior attorney for the American Medical Association.
A 1987 graduate of the Loyola University School of Law, she has been a member of the Supreme Court Committee on Professional Responsibility since 1995.
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Bloomington attorney Rebecca Simmons Foley became an associate judge of the 11th Circuit this month, replacing William D. DeCardy, who retired in December. A 1995 graduate of the DePaul University College of Law, she practiced with the Thielen Law Offices.
The recall appointment of Cook County Judge Leonard L. Levin has been extended to next Dec. 1. He served for 18 years before compulsory retirement in December 2002.
Chief judges change
Judge Kathryn E. Zenoff of the 17th Circuit has been elected its first female chief judge. A jurist since 1995, she succeeds Gerald Grubb, who continues as presiding judge in Boone County.
Chief Judge Kendall Wenzelman of the 21st Circuit resigned his position Dec. 31 after seven years and will remain on the bench. He has been a judge since 1993 and chief judge since 1996.
Judge William G. Schwartz of the 1st Circuit has succeeded David W. Watt Jr. as presiding judge in Jackson County. Watt retired from the bench Nov. 30. Schwartz was president of the Illinois Judges Association in 1997.
Judge John R. Goshgarian, former chief judge of the 19th Circuit, has announced that he will not seek retention this year. A jurist since 1983, he was chief judge from 1992 to 1995.
Rhoda Sweeney is a judge again
Former ISBA Assembly member Rhoda Davis Sweeney, a current member of the Elder Law Section Council, was appointed Dec. 10 to the Cook County Circuit Court for an interim term that will expire next Dec. 6.
She replaces retired judge Nancy Sidote Salyers, who was presiding judge of the 2nd Municipal District when she left the bench in October to join the Children and Family Research Center of the University of Illinois School of Social Work.
Judge Sweeney previously served in the circuit court's Juvenile Division by appointment from September 1995 to December 1996. She was installed both times by Supreme Court Justice Mary Ann G. McMorrow, now the chief justice.
A 1981 honors graduate of the Chicago-Kent College of Law, Sweeney was an assistant state's attorney until 1987, when she began a practice in criminal and family law that ended with her first judicial appointment.
Sweeney, who has a master's degree in speech and language, was on the staff of the Chicago Department on Aging from 1998 until 2003, when she resumed private practice.
Q:Should the words plaintiff and defendant be capitalized? What, for example, is the correct form in the following sentences taken from a pleading?
