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Patricia McCoy, a leading expert on issues of financial services regulation, has joined the Boston College Law School faculty as the inaugural Liberty Mutual Insurance Professor in property and casualty insurance law.
A researcher on the nexus between financial products, consumer welfare and systemic risk, McCoy was among the first to raise alarms about the dangers of subprime loans, the subject of her 2002 article in the Texas Law Review. While at the US Department of Treasury from 2010-11, McCoy helped form the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and served as its assistant director for mortgage markets, overseeing the bureau’s mortgage policy initiatives.
McCoy, who was most recently director of the University of Connecticut School of Law Insurance Law Center, was a visiting scholar in the MIT Economics Department and served on the Federal Reserve’s Consumer Advisory Council and on the board of the Insurance Marketplace Standards Association.
She has testified before Congress and shared her expertise with the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and National Public Radio, among others. Her publications include the books Financial Modernization after Gramm-Leach-Bliley and The Subprime Virus: Reckless Credit, Regulatory Failure, and Next Steps, co-authored with Kathleen C. Engel.
The professorship McCoy holds was established through a $3.1 million gift from Liberty Mutual Group, the largest gift in the Law School’s history.
“We’re very pleased to welcome Pat McCoy to BC Law,” said Dean Vincent Rougeau. “Her expertise strengthens our dynamic faculty and fulfills the promise and opportunity provided to us by Liberty Mutual’s generous gift: to bring one of the nation’s leaders in financial services regulation and insurance law to campus.”
“The Liberty Mutual Professorship piqued my interest because it offered me the opportunity to work with renowned legal scholars and extend my research in insurance law while teaching top-notch students in a sophisticated financial community,” said McCoy, who is teaching Insurance Law this semester, and will also direct courses on the regulation of banking and other financial services.
“BC Law also offers something very special that is missing at many other law schools, which is an official commitment to advancing social justice in the law. That mission dovetails perfectly with my work and makes BC Law an inviting environment in which to work. Meanwhile, I am excited at the chance to help BC Law deepen its curriculum in financial services regulation and law. And, of course, the greater Boston academic and public policy community offers endless opportunities for professional discourse and collaboration that are attractive.”
McCoy said her teaching and research interests on financial services regulation – with a particular eye to mortgage policy in the wake of the subprime loan controversy – are well-suited to a law school setting.
“Banking, insurance, and now securities – especially with the growth in mutual funds in 401(k) plans – directly affect everyone’s financial well-being,” she explained. “Ideally, that is for the good but sometimes it is for the bad. Given the social welfare implications of financial services, it is important for BC Law to train lawyers about their pivotal role in enacting the laws and regulations in this area and in how to think creatively about solving the many vexing problems that financial services present.
“The financial services regulation area has been really fascinating to work in since the financial system almost melted down in 2008. There is no end of interesting and gratifying topics to write on and lawyers who work in this area never get bored. Meanwhile, it is an area where lawyers can do a lot of good.”
Among her current projects, McCoy is examining countercyclical regulation, which posits that regulation should be stricter during economic booms and ease up during recessions, instead of the opposite. She also is analyzing theories of systemic risk and how the federal government’s implementation of those theories is altering the regulation of insurance companies. This coming spring, she plans to begin a study on how to design private annuities to assure financial security for older Americans when they retire.
A Lawrence, Kansas, native who earned her bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College and her juris doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley, McCoy clerked for the late Hon. Robert S. Vance on the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit and was a partner at Mayer Brown in Washington, DC, specializing in complex securities, banking and constitutional litigation.
In 2012, the American Law Institute named her as an adviser to the Third Restatement on Consumer Contracts. She currently sits on the Advisory Committee on Economic Inclusion of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.