Patricia A. McCoy is the inaugural Liberty Mutual Insurance Professor at Boston College Law School. A nationally prominent scholar in financial regulation, her most recent book, Sharing Risk: The Path to Economic Well-Being for All with the University of California Press, discusses the financial precarity of American families. In 2010 and 2011, McCoy joined the U.S. Department of the Treasury, where she helped form the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and oversaw the Bureau’s mortgage policy initiatives as the CFPB’s first head of mortgage markets. She teaches insurance law, banking regulation, consumer financial protection, and a full array of other financial regulatory courses.
McCoy's research focuses on the nexus among financial services, household finance, and systemic risk, analyzed through the lens of law, economics, and empirical methods. In “A Tale of Three Markets: The Law and Economics of Predatory Lending” (Texas Law Review), McCoy was among the first to raise alarms about the dangers of subprime loans. She has four books to her credit, including The Subprime Virus with Kathleen Engel, published by Oxford University Press. The author of numerous book chapters and articles, she has testified repeatedly before Congress and been quoted in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and on National Public Radio.
Previously, McCoy was a visiting scholar at the MIT Economics Department and served on the Federal Reserve’s Consumer Advisory Council and the board of the Insurance Marketplace Standards Association. In 2012, the American Law Institute named her as an adviser to the Restatement of the Law, Consumer Contracts. More recently, she sat on the Insurance Policy Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve Board and the FDIC’s Advisory Committee on Economic Inclusion. The American College of Consumer Financial Services Lawyers elected her as a Fellow in 2022.
McCoy received her law degree from U.C. Berkeley, where she was Editor-in-Chief of the Industrial Relations Law Journal. Following graduation, she clerked for the Hon. Robert S. Vance on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit and then was a partner at Mayer Brown in Washington, D.C., specializing in complex securities, banking, and constitutional litigation. Later, she was the Director of the Insurance Law Center at the University of Connecticut School of Law before joining the Boston College faculty in 2014. In her other life, McCoy is a longtime singer, performing choral works and operas with major orchestras.
RECENT MEDIA & APPEARANCES
