Patricia A. McCoy

Biography

Patricia A. McCoy, a renowned expert on financial services regulation, is the Connecticut Mutual Professor of Law and Director of the Law School’s Insurance Law Center.  In 2010 and 2011, she served at the U.S. Department of the Treasury in Washington, D.C., where she helped form the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  At the Bureau, Elizabeth Warren appointed Professor McCoy as the first Assistant Director for Mortgage Markets, where she oversaw all of the CFPB's mortgage policy initiatives.  Professor McCoy's courses include banking, insurance, and securities regulation, mutual and hedge fund law, pension law, corporate governance, and consumer finance regulation.
 
Professor McCoy received her B.A. from Oberlin College and her J.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, where she was Editor-in-Chief of the Industrial Relations Law Journal (now the Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law). After graduation, she clerked for the late Judge Robert S. Vance of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Her practice years were spent at Mayer Brown in Washington, D.C., where she was a partner specializing in complex securities, banking and constitutional litigation.  She began her teaching career at Cleveland State University before coming to Connecticut in 2002.
 
Professor McCoy's research and teaching interests focus on the nexus between financial products, consumer welfare, 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, 80 Tex. L. Rev. 1255 (2002), Professor McCoy and her longtime coauthor, Kathleen Engel, were among of the first to raise alarms about the dangers of subprime loans.  In addition to numerous book chapters and articles, Professor McCoy has three books to her credit: The Subprime Virus: Reckless Credit, Regulatory Failure, and Next Steps (Oxford Univ. Press 2011), with Kathleen C. Engel; Banking Law Manual: Federal Regulation of Financial Holding Companies, Banks and Thrifts (2d ed. 2000 & cum. supp.) and Financial Modernization After Gramm-Leach-Bliley (2002). She sits on the Editorial Advisory Board for the Cambridge Series on Law, Finance, and Economics of Oxford University Press.
 
In 2002-2003, Professor McCoy was a Visiting Scholar at the MIT Economics Department. She served on the Consumer Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve Board from 2002 to 2004, where she chaired the Council's Consumer Credit Committee.  From 2003-2008, she also sat on the board of directors of the Insurance Marketplace Standards Association, the leading market conduct and compliance organization for life insurers. In 2001, Professor McCoy served as chair of the Section on Financial Institutions and Consumer Financial Services of the Association of American Law Schools. More recently, the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing and the University of Pretoria appointed her as honorary guest professor.
 
Professor McCoy has testified before Congress and has been quoted in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Los Angeles Times, Bloomberg, Forbes, and National Public Radio, among others, on financial regulation and risk management. Active in the Law and Society Association, she has lectured around the world, including in Russia, Eastern Europe, Africa, South America, and China. In her other life, she is an opera fan and choral singer and sang for many years with the Cleveland Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra, and the Hartford Chorale.
 

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SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Books

The Subprime Virus:  Reckless Credit, Regulatory Failure, and Next Steps (Oxford University Press, 2011) (with Kathleen C. Engel).

Financial Modernization After Gramm-Leach-Bliley (Patricia A. McCoy ed., Lexis 2002).

Banking Law Manual: Federal Regulation of Financial Holding Companies, Banks and Thrifts (Lexis 2d ed. 2000 & cumulative supplements).

Book Chapters

Federal Preemption, Regulatory Failure and the Race to the Bottom in US Mortgage Lending Standards, in The Panic of 2008 (Lawrence Mitchell & Arthur E. Wilmarth, Jr., eds., Edward Elgar Press, 2010).

The Impact of Predatory Lending Laws:  Policy Implications and Insights (with Raphael Bostic, Kathleen C. Engel, Anthony Pennington-Cross & Susan Wachter) in Borrowing to Live: Consumer and Mortgage Credit Revisited 138 (Nicolas P. Retsinas & Eric S. Belsky eds., Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University & Brookings Institution Press, 2008).

The Legal Infrastructure of Subprime and Nontraditional Mortgage Lending (with Elizabeth Renuart), in Borrowing to Live: Consumer and Mortgage Credit Revisited 110 (Nicolas P. Retsinas & Eric S. Belsky eds., Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University and Brookings Institution Press, 2008).

The Moral Hazard Implications of Deposit Insurance:  Theory and Practice, in 5 Current Developments in Financial and Monetary Law 417 (International Monetary Fund, 2008).

From Credit Denial To Predatory Lending: The Challenge Of Sustaining Minority Homeownership, in Segregation:  The Rising Costs for America (James H. Carr & Nandinee Kutty, eds., Routledge, 2008) (with Kathleen C. Engel).

Articles and Monographs

Public Engagement in Rulemaking:  The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s New Approach, ___ Brooklyn J. Corp., Finan. & Commercial L. ___ (forthcoming 2012).

Mortgage Product Substitution and State Anti-Predatory Lending Laws:  Better Loans and Better Borrowers?  (with Raphael Bostic, Souphala Chomsisengphet, Kathleen C. Engel, Anthony Pennington-Cross & Susan Wachter), Atlantic Econ. J. (forthcoming 2012).  

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: Financial Regulation for the 21st Century, 98 Cornell L. Rev. 1141 (2012) (with Leonard Kennedy & Ethan Bernstein).

Securitization and Systemic Risk Amid Deregulation and Regulatory Failure, 41 Conn. L. Rev. 493 (2009) (with Andrey D. Pavlov & Susan Wachter).

State and Local Anti-Predatory Lending Laws:  The Effect of Legal Enforcement Mechanisms, 60 J. Econ. & Bus. 47-66 (2008) (with Raphael Bostic, Kathleen C. Engel, Anthony Pennington-Cross & Susan Wachter).

Rethinking Disclosure in a World of Risk-Based Pricing, 44 Harv. J. Legis. 123 (2007).

Turning a Blind Eye:  Wall Street Finance Of Predatory Lending, 75 Fordham L. Rev. 2039 (2007) (with Kathleen C. Engel).

A Behavioral Analysis of Predatory Lending, 38 Akron L. Rev. 725 (2005).

A Tale of Three Markets Revisited, 82 Tex. L. Rev. 439 (Dec. 2003) (with Kathleen C. Engel).

Realigning Auditors' Incentives, 35 Conn. L. Rev. 989 (2003).

A Tale of Three Markets: The Law and Economics of Predatory Lending, 80 Tex. L. Rev. 1255 (2002) (with Kathleen C. Engel).

Levers of Law Reform:  Public Goods and Russian Banking, 30 Cornell Int'l L.J. 45 (1997).

A Political Economy of the Business Judgment Rule in Banking:  Implications for Corporate Law, 47 Case W. Res. L. Rev. 1 (1996).

The Notional Business Judgment Rule In Banking, 44 Cath. U.L. Rev. 1031 (1995).