Broadly described, I am interested in strategies for economic development that seek to integrate poor people into mainstream markets. Over the past several years, my focus has been on credit, including microcredit, mortgages and credit cards. I have found some interesting commonalities in the ways in which lenders and borrowers behave in these different lending contexts. For example, I just finished an article in which I hypothesize that both microlenders and credit card lenders have developed ways to collateralize their borrowers' sense of human worth. I am currently working on two different projects. The first is a commentary on a panel discussion at the Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Conference at the College of William and Mary Law School comparing the treatment of property rights to other rights under the Bill of Rights. As a property law professor, I am fascinated by takings law, and I am enjoying the opportunity to explore this area in more depth. I am also writing an article exploring Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto's claim that formal property ownership is the key to the Western world's wealth. The focus of my inquiry is on homeownership by the poor in the United States and the extent to which their formal ownership contributes to their accumulation of wealth.

Most of my work in practice dealt with transactions rather than cases. Some of my favorite transactions involved electronic commerce in one form or another. For example, I worked for a consortium of banks that was interested in developing, sharing and integrating smart card and other electronic payment technology. I also worked with several retailers on setting up Web sites for online shopping. At the time that I was working on these deals, there were so many unanswered questions about how electronic commerce would work. We developed protocols for electronic signatures, click-through agreements and security policies. I often found myself working without any models, because no one we knew had ever encountered the legal questions our clients were facing. That was fun.

I also really enjoyed the affordable housing deals that I worked on while at The Community Builders. These were typically enormous deals, involving five to ten sources of financing, federal, state and local regulations—and some truly bizarre personalities. Each deal felt like a giant puzzle, requiring both painstaking attention to detail and some wild guesses. I suppose my favorite was the one where my client acquired a parcel adjacent to a fancy townhouse development. The parcel that we acquired had once been owned by the developer of the fancy townhouses next door. Probably in anticipation of developing more townhouses on the parcel we acquired, the developer had granted a right to the future residents of our parcel to use the swimming pool on the fancy-townhouse parcel. Once the townhouse owners heard that we were planning to build affordable housing next door, however, they voiced some vociferous objections (including at zoning meetings and other public hearings) to having to share their pool. In the end, though, we built the housing and won the right for the residents to use the pool.

Over the summer, my article on microlending in the United States, "Reflection in a Distant Mirror: Why the West has Misperceived the Grameen Bank's Vision of Microcredit," was published in the Stanford Journal of International Law. This fall, I expect an article titled "From Status to Contract: Evolving Paradigms for Regulating Consumer Credit" to be published in the Tennessee Law Review; the article compares the rights of people who borrow money using their homes as equity to the rights of those who use credit cards to borrow large sums of money, and concludes that the law provides less protection to credit card borrowers. I also have a piece, "Human Worth as Collateral," forthcoming in the Rutgers Law Journal.

It's a tie: Tolstoy's Resurrection and The Complete Tales of Winnie-the-Pooh. They share some interesting lessons.

Anything necessary to hear my husband and nine-month-old son laugh.

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