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Looking Up Foreclosure Statutes

Your state’s page in the appendix lists references to the laws governing foreclosures in your state. These references are termed citations, and the laws are known as statutes. By using the citation, you can find and read for yourself your state’s laws on such matters as:

• how much notice you are entitled to before your home is sold in a foreclosure
• how much notice you are entitled to before you are evicted after a foreclosure sale
• how much time you have to reinstate or redeem your mortgage after a default
• whether your lender can sue you for a deficiency judgment and if so, under what conditions, and
• what special protections you are entitled to if you have a high-cost mortgage (one with a much higher interest rate than normal).

You can easily locate statutes online, or in most states at a law library or even at a public library.

There are two fundamental ways to find your state statutes on foreclosure:

• Once you find a collection of the statutes, you can browse through various levels of subject headings (usually organized hierarchically numbered title, article, chapter, and section).
• You can go to the state law collection at www.justia.com and search for the keywords you’re interested in.

More information on legal research. Legal research is its own subject; if you want to delve into it more deeply, see Legal Research: How to Find & Understand the Law, by Stephen Elias and Susan Levinkind (Nolo). My goal here is just to show you how to look up statutes listed on the state pages in the appendix.