Patricia McCoy

Patricia McCoy is the inaugural Liberty Mutual Insurance Professor of Law at Boston College Law School. She specializes in financial regulation, consumer protection, and systemic risk analysis. Her work focuses on the intersection of law, economics, and empirical methods to address issues in banking, insurance, and household finance. She served as the first head of mortgage markets at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) after helping establish it within the U.S. Treasury Department. McCoy has authored four books, including The Subprime Virus, and testified frequently before Congress.

Education: B.A., Oberlin College; J.D., University of California, Berkeley. She clerked for Judge Robert S. Vance (U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit) and later practiced securities litigation at Mayer Brown. Prior to Boston College, she directed the Insurance Law Center at the University of Connecticut School of Law.

Research Interests: McCoy’s scholarship examines predatory lending, mortgage market dynamics, systemic risk regulation, and the ethical obligations of financial institutions. She has pioneered analyses of subprime lending risks and their societal impacts, advocating for policies that balance market innovation with consumer and systemic safeguards.

Awards & Roles: Appointed adviser to the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law, Consumer Contracts (2012); Fellow of the American College of Consumer Financial Services Lawyers (2022). She has served on federal advisory councils, including the Federal Reserve’s Consumer Advisory Council and the FDIC’s Advisory Committee on Economic Inclusion.

Advocacy & Media: McCoy frequently engages in public discourse, commenting on banking regulations, mortgage policies, and financial stability via media outlets like The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and NPR. Her recent work addresses wealth gaps, insurance regulation, and the risks posed by nonbank financial entities.

Labs/Teams: Collaborates with interdisciplinary groups on financial policy reform, including affiliations with MIT’s Economics Department (as visiting scholar) and the Insurance Marketplace Standards Association.