Our Director
Patricia A. McCoy is the Director of the Insurance Law Center and the Connecticut Mutual Professor of Law. 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 to be 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.
