HARTFORD, Conn. – Professor Patricia A. McCoy, a top national expert on financial services regulation, has been chosen to head UConn Law School’s Insurance Law Center, the only insurance law center in the country.
Currently the George J. and Helen M. England Professor of Law, McCoy joined the faculty at UConn Law in 2002. A renowned expert on the financial crisis, McCoy is regularly sought out by Congress and the press for her views on financial regulation and risk management systems. Her diverse research and teaching interests span the field of insurance, from life insurance, pension plan administration, annuities, securities, banking and mutual funds to public insurance schemes, including Social Security, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, deposit insurance, and other federal guarantees. In her research, McCoy analyzes risk management, moral hazard, and systemic risk through the lens of law, economics, and empirical methods.
“We are fortunate indeed to find such a first-rate scholar and teacher within our ranks to assume this important leadership post,” said UConn Law Dean Jeremy Paul. “Our faculty was particularly impressed with Professor McCoy’s vision for the center, which recognized the growing overlap among the worlds of insurance, risk management, and financial services.”
“Financial risk is the pressing concern of the day,” said McCoy, who was a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of the international law firm Mayer Brown, and a Visiting Scholar at the M.I.T. Economics Department before coming to UConn. “Insurance is society’s leading instrument for the management of risk. The insights and services of insurance will be critical in surmounting the crisis we face.”
McCoy is currently writing a book on the credit crisis and recently testified on the subject before the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. Her testimony was later praised in a New York Times editorial. She also has been quoted in The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Los Angeles Times, Bloomberg, Forbes, and on National Public Radio, among others, on financial services and regulatory reform.
From 2003 through 2008, McCoy served on the board of directors of the Insurance Marketplace Standards Association, the leading market conduct and compliance organization for life insurers and providers of variable annuities and long term care insurance in the United States. Before that, from 2002 through 2004, she served on the Consumer Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve Board, the umbrella supervisor for insurance companies owned by bank holding companies. McCoy also served as an advisor to the recent Obama presidential campaign and the Obama transition team. In 2009, McCoy was elected as a James W. Cooper Fellow of the Connecticut Bar Foundation. She also sits on the Editorial Advisory Board for the Cambridge Series on Law, Finance, and Economics of Oxford University Press.
McCoy received her law degree from the University of California-Berkeley School of Law in 1983 and her undergraduate degree from Oberlin College.
She clerked for the Hon. Robert S. Vance on the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. As a partner at Mayer Brown, McCoy represented major accounting firms in some of the biggest professional liability lawsuits coming out of the savings and loan crisis. Later, at M.I.T., McCoy concentrated on pension economics and corporate finance. McCoy has two books to her name and numerous articles and other commentary. In 2007, McCoy was named an honorary guest professor of insurance at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing.
The only program of its kind, the Insurance Law Center engages in serious and systematic research of the law bearing on insurance, risk and responsibility. The Center provides a forum to debate the financial risk issues of the day and offers the only Insurance Law LL.M. degree in the United States, providing students with a solid grounding in the principles of insurance. The Center’s broad menu of specialized courses, taught by recognized experts in the field, prepares graduates to address problems of insurance, risk and responsibility in a variety of institutional settings: private law firms, regulatory agencies, insurance and other financial services companies, health care organizations, corporate law departments, and academic and non-profit institutions.
Blessed with a spectacular campus and conveniently located within an increasingly vibrant urban capital, the University of Connecticut School of Law is recognized for its rigorous academic programs and collegial, supportive community. The faculty includes path-breaking scholars in many areas including intellectual property, taxation, international law and human rights, family law, insurance law, corporate groups, environmental law and Indian law. Special emphasis is placed to ensure that each student has an opportunity to put skills learned in the classroom into practice, and clinical opportunities focus on criminal law, human rights and asylum law, tax, intellectual property and entrepreneurship law, children’s advocacy, urban issues and mediation. The Law School hosts the only Insurance Law Center in the nation.