Several in-the-know readers have passed along an incendiary anonymous memo making the rounds among administrators and trustees regarding financial mismanagement at the University of Miami.

Thanks folks, but I'm not touching it -- it's even too hot for your humble crappy (lawsuit-averse) blogger.

Instead, let's regale over Greenberg's request for an incentive award of $4 million on top of their $20 million in fees for handling the Southeast Bank bankruptcy. Those greedy plaintiffs' lawyers!

(Young ones, Southeast Bank was something big and powerful that existed a long, long time ago, like dinosaurs and David Paul).

And get a load of this hilarous column by Virginia Heffernan in which she finds that online commenters to Anne Applebaum's NYT column are pretty much uninformed, mean-spirited, anti-semitic, sexist pigs.

In other words, dog bites man:

Commenters, in short, rarely really sock it to a columnist. They also too often go automatic, churning out 100-word synopses of one stock ideological position after another. But most disappointing of all, for readers, is that commenters don’t, as literary critics say, read an article against itself to show how, for example, an argument framed as incendiary is in fact banal, or one that’s meant to be feminist is retrogressive, or one that touts its originality is a knockoff.

Instead, paradoxically, commenters frequently reiterate Applebaum’s own arguments in the service of their would-be critiques. Last year, for instance, when Applebaum described her newfound disillusionment with John McCain, whom she supported for president in 2000, many commenters criticized her bygone support for McCain by doing little more than rehashing her new case against him, which she had just presented.

This echo-chamber effect is unpleasant, and it makes it hard to keep listening for the clearer, brighter, rarer voices nearly drowned out in the online din.

I immediately thought of the comments posted on the Miami Herald website. Can you imagine if someone took the time to break those down? Oy, oy, and triple-oy.

I meant to put this up Friday, but it's a slow news day so enjoy this silver lining from our friend, Mr. Deepening Recession.

Other tips always welcome!

You may recall the continuing efforts by Roberto Martinez, on behalf of longtime and beloved UM Law School Dean Hausler, to collect on a default judgment against the Cuban government relating to the 1960 torture and death of her brother Bobby Fuller.

The latest twist is a case recently removed and pending before Judge King in which Dean Hausler seeks to garnish funds allegedly retained by Tata Communications, a telecommunications company. Tata is represented by Michael Higer.

You can read the docket here.

Michael's answer (filed in state court before removal) asserts that the plaintiffs bear the burden and have not shown that ETECSA -- the telecommunications provider in Cuba -- is an instrumentality of the Cuban government and, even if it was, his client owes no money to it.

Higer also asserts that this case is entirely different than the Hausler I, the case brought against telephone provider EmtelCuba, in which there was no dispute that EmtelCuba was an agent or instrumentality of the Cuban government, and thus subject to garnishment for a judgment against the Cuban government.

The answer asserts that the extant evidence indicates that ETECSA is owned by Dutch, Italian, Panamanian and Cuban companies and thus would not be an agent or instrumentality of the Cuban government under existing law.

That seems like a tough sell, but who knows?

You can see some wonderful photos of Dean Hausler here.

It's nice to see a good idea reach fruition, as is the case with UM Law Professor Michael Froomkin's Foreclosure Fellowships, which received national attention in this Time article:

That specter of judicial paralysis helped spur UM law professor Michael Froomkin to create the foreclosure defense program. It places fledgling attorneys like Paschal with legal aid service organizations to help tackle the backlog of cases — more than 50,000 foreclosure filings so far this year in Miami-Dade County alone. Many homeowners don't know what legal defenses are available to them as they battle lenders to keep their properties — or at least make foreclosure less painful, and costly. "Potentially, one of the most significant [defenses] is that the lender, because so many home loans were securitized during the housing boom, often doesn't even know who owns the mortgage anymore," says Froomkin. That, he adds, could throw into question the lender's right to bring the foreclosure case in the first place.

Carolina Lombardi, senior attorney at Legal Services of Greater Miami Inc., which is mentoring some of the UM fellows, says foreclosure defendants also need attorneys to help them fend off all too frequent lender practices such as exorbitant escrow claims. "Homeowners who have lawyers are usually prevailing in those cases," says Lombardi. But she notes that unless homeowners fall below the federal poverty line ($22,000 for a family of four), they can't qualify for the free legal aid that agencies like hers provide. That creates an obstacle for most foreclosure defendants, who aren't impoverished but, due to job loss and other circumstances that brought them to the brink of losing their home, often can't afford a lawyer.

Another impediment is foreclosure law itself, a bureaucratically convoluted field worthy of a Dickens novel. "It's a labor-intensive area of practice," says Paschal. "It involves a ton of paperwork." Yet another is the relatively low pay attorneys usually reap from defending foreclosure clients. Melanca Clark, counsel at the Brennan Center and co-author of this month's study, urges Congress and state legislatures to create incentives, like more funding for foreclosure legal representation, that "level the playing field" against lenders and their comparatively well paid lawyers. Restrictions on government funding for legal services should be relaxed, she says, especially rules that don't let victorious foreclosure defendants collect attorney fees, as prevailing parties in most other kinds of civil litigation do. "We need structural reforms as badly as we need more [foreclosure defense] lawyers," says Clark.

The Professor also points to this NYT article from Saturday on how some judges are holding banks' feet to the fire on producing the underlying mortgage documents, which in one case led a federal judge to dismiss a claim based on a securitized mortgage where the alleged assignee could not provide proof that it owned the underlying note, effectively wiping out a $461k debt.

I'm fine with all that, provided the Judge who dismissed the case did so without the slightest hint of compassion.