If a particular party is, in fact, the rightful mortgage holder, it should be easy for that party to produce the legal documents required to prove that ownership. As soon as the alleged mortgage holder complies with the law, I’m sure the judge will let the foreclosure proceed.
You would think so, but I’ve worked on these deals, and I sympathize with the judge’s difficulty of figuring out who actually “owns” the mortgage. There are generally several financial institutions involved in these deals, and different places in the papers give each of them certain rights. My point is that it really is not necessary to figure out which one of them “owns” the mortgage. All of those institutions are acting on behalf of the bondholders, who own the debt, and the mortgage by law follows the debt. Thus, unless there is some confusion as to who the bondholders are, there should be no issue for the judge to decide in that regard. The identity of the bondholders is usually not in dispute, although they are also generally not parties to the foreclosure anyway. The bank appears as the plaintiff in its capacity as agent.
To me, it seems like a case of the judge unable to see the forest for the trees.