Contesting Scales of Justice: Law and the Geography of the US Antipredatory Lending Movement

*Mark Treskon † While the social movements literature has increasingly incorporated sociospatial categories into its conceptual toolkit, this article argues that tracing the concrete ways in which a particular category—“scale”—is mobilized as a stake of political debate helps us refine its workings in practice. Integrating research on the co-constitutive nature of law and political action, this article traces how efforts to pass antipredatory home lending legislation in the United States during the 1990s and 2000s resulted in a rescaled home-lending legal regime. Using judicial and regulatory documents, media accounts, and publications by advocates, government actors, lawyers and the financial industry, I analyze the mechanisms through which this occurred. Debates about federalism, home rule, and preemption illustrate that involved parties attempted to “fix” a legal regime scaled according to their organizational strengths. Finally, this case illustrates how discourses around globalization and economic rationality inform the trajectory of legal debates. Autopsies of the 2000s housing boom in the United States and its subsequent collapse have tended to focus on one of two elements: first, the roles played by transnational corporations, associations of bankers and mortgage lenders, federal regulators, credit-rating agencies, and politicians; second, the actions by individuals who bought into an increasingly unsustainable market, whether speculators hoping to turn a quick profit, or families attempting to buy into the “American dream” of homeownership. At the center of these changes was the “subprime” home lending market and, more broadly, the loosening of credit standards that—for a time at least— expanded the potential universe of eligible borrowers even as housing prices boomed. But accounts of inevitable regulatory change, growing internationalization and consolidation of the financial industry, rapid expansion of consumer credit, and increasing financial liquidity tend to underemphasize the presence of critical countercurrents during this period. This article discusses one such countercurrent: the efforts, starting in the 1990s, to press for legislative and regulatory reforms to curb a subset of subprime home loans known as “predatory.” While subprime lending, broadly defined as lending to consumers with less-than-perfect credit by using relatively high interest rates or other fees, was seen as a tool to expand the benefits of homeownership to previously excluded (often minority and low-income) communities, predatory lending (using abusive terms and fees to strip wealth from the borrower) was thought to exploit these same communities. Through analyzing how advocacy and nonprofit organizations pushed, successfully in many cases, for municipal, state, and federal legislation designed to stem predatory lending, this article traces a particular way in which these groups participated in and influenced the trajectory of political debates and legislative and regulatory practices. Building on recent efforts to supplement the social movement literature through integrating geographic theory (Martin and Miller 2003; Nicholls 2009) and legal studies (Edelman, Leachman, and McAdam 2010), this article makes a two-part analytic claim. First, scale itself can be a “stake” of social movement activity, contested and reshaped by social movement actors and their opponents. Second, the institutions of law are central arenas for these efforts, whether