Patricia A. McCoy, the inaugural Liberty Mutual Insurance Professor of Law at Boston College, has released her latest book, Sharing Risk: The Path to Economic Well-Being for All. This is McCoy’s fourth such work, building on her research on the intersections of financial regulation, consumer protection, and economic justice.
In Sharing Risk, McCoy explores explanations as to why financial burdens have shifted onto the backs of individual US families over the past sixty years. She examines how businesses and governments have slowly widened the wealth gap, presenting policy recommendations on risk sharing that would build a more equitable financial system.
McCoy describes her intentions this way: “A couple of inspirations led to my book. One was the number of family members, friends, students, and law clients I had met over my lifetime who were living in deep financial insecurity. Usually, that was due to no fault of their own.
“The other was the realization that consumer financial protection is not enough alone to put struggling families on secure financial footing. Today, in fact, half of American households do not have enough income to meet their basic needs. They need additional safety nets, including a higher minimum wage and better unemployment insurance. My book explores these and other ways to bring economic well-being to these families and to enable them to flourish.”
The book is already resonating, receiving glowing reviews from scholars and colleagues, including Harvard Law Professor Christine A. Desan, who called it a “pathbreaking” book, and Gail Hillebrand, a retired division leader of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, who said, “This book provides an amazing blueprint of policy changes necessary to build the United States we all want to live in.”
McCoy received her law degree from UC Berkeley before becoming a partner at Mayer Brown in Washington, DC, specializing in complex securities, banking, and constitutional litigation. Recognized as one of the nation’s leading experts on financial regulation, she has worked in the US Department of the Treasury where she helped form the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
McCoy also stands as a distinguished legal academic and policy expert, previously serving as a visiting scholar at the MIT Economics Department, sitting on the Insurance Policy Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve Board, and on the advisory board for the Rappaport Center for Law and Public Policy at BC Law. More recently, in 2022, she was elected as a Fellow for The American College of Consumer Financial Services Lawyers.