Douglas Whaley

.   It’s a popular phrase: “ I don’t believe in coincidences .”   You hear it all the time in actual conversations, movies, TV, etc., and particularly in detective fiction.   The problem with uttering it is that it immediately identifies the speaker as dimwitted.   With billions of people interacting, billions of events occurring, billions of catastrophes (large and small) causing their misery each and every day, well then, billions of coincidences will occur.   They’re a routine part of life.   To imbue them with some sort of mysticism is romantic twaddle or muddled thinking. All right, sometimes when the detective in the story says “I don’t believe in coincidences,” what is meant is “I don’t believe this was accidental, but planned.”   If that’s so, the statement is merely messy, not wrong.   What the detective should say is ““I don’t believe this was a coincidence.”     [Click to enlarge] But if the speaker truly mean...

. For the last few years I have been crossing the country giving lectures on what I now call the "Golden Rule of Mortgage Foreclosures," which is that such foreclosures cannot proceed without production of the original promissory note signed at the closing.  A symposium at Western State University Law School last year at which I gave the keynote address turned into a law review article on point, and that law review article is reprinted below in full.  The correct citation for the printed version is 39 W. St. U. L. Rev. 313 (2012).  As subsequent developments occur I will add them in red to the original article below.  Any corrections or suggestions may be sent to me at dglswhaley@aol.com .                                             ...