Linda E. Fisher
Professor of Law
Linda E. Fisher's professional and academic interests link theory and practice. Professor Fisher’s current concentration is in the areas of foreclosure and mortgage fraud. Through her clinical work in the Center for Social Justice, she and her students defend borrowers in foreclosure and pursue a variety of consumer and civil rights claims against sub-prime lenders and foreclosure rescue scammers. Professor Fisher also integrates broader advocacy efforts into her practice and engages in legislative and policy advocacy on behalf of consumer and civil rights groups. She recently testified before the House Financial Services Committee at a hearing on Robo-signing, Chain of Title and Loss Mitigation Issues. She also spoke at a Federal Trade Commission conference on mortgage fraud.
Professor Fisher currently teaches Civil Procedure and Professional Responsibility in addition to the Civil Litigation Clinic. From 1995 to 2006, she was the Director of the Center for Social Justice. Prof. Fisher has published in the areas of subprime lending and mortgage fraud, civil rights, and public interest litigation. She was recently named a Bellow Scholar by the American Association of Law Schools for her research project studying the relationship between vacant urban properties and banks’ abandonment of foreclosures. She is a member of the New Jersey Supreme Court Committee on Minority Concerns and the Newark/Essex Foreclosure Task Force.
Before coming to Seton Hall in 1995, Professor Fisher was an Assistant Professor at Penn State-Dickinson Law School. Prior to that, she was a constitutional civil rights lawyer in Chicago and taught at Northwestern Law School. She received an LL.M. from Northwestern, a J.D. from the University of Chicago and her B.A., magna cum laude, from Macalester College.
PUBLICATIONS
LAW REVIEW ARTICLES
Shadowed by the Shadow Inventory: A Newark, New Jersey Case Study of Stalled Foreclosures & Their Consequences, 3 U.C. Irvine L. Rev.__ (forthcoming 2013)
Reverse Redlining, Racialized Consumer Fraud and Target Marketing of Subprime Loans, 18 Brooklyn J. of L. & Pol'y 101 (2009)
Guilt By Expressive Association: Political Profiling, Surveillance, and the Privacy of Groups, 46 Ariz. L. Rev. 621 (2004)
I Know It When I See It, or What Makes Scholarship Feminist: A Cautionary Tale, 12 Colum. J. Gender & L. 439 (2003)
Pragmatism Is As Pragmatism Does: Of Posner, Public Policy, and Empirical Reality, 31N.M. L. Rev. (2001)
Anatomy of an Affirmative Duty to Protect: 42 U.S.C. Section 1986, 56 Washington & Lee L. Rev. 461 (1999)
A Communitarian Compromise on Speech Codes: Restraining the Hostile Environment Concept, 44 Cath. U. L. Rev. 97 (1994)
Caging Lyons: The Availability of Injunctive Relief in Section 1983 Actions, 18 Loy. U. Chi. L.J. 1085 (1987)
The Proportionality Test in Section 1988 Fee Awards, 14 Loy. U. Chi. L.J. 1 (1982) (with Edward T. Stein)
OTHER JOURNAL ARTICLES
Truth as a Double-Edged Sword: Deception, Moral Paradox and the Ethics of Advocacy, 14 J. of the Legal Prof. 89 (1989)
OTHER PUBLICATIONS
Attacking Foreclosure Rescue Scams, 2010 Emerging Issues 5309, Lexis Nexis Matthew Bender Research Solutions (2010) (with Leena Khandawala)
BOOK REVIEWS
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms: Autonomy, the Common Good, and the Courts, 18 Yale Law & Policy Review 351 (2000)