Senator Warren's Autobiography to be Published

Jill Lepore's review of Senator Elizabeth Warren's new autobiography, A Fighting Chance, in the current issue of the New Yorker, makes for fascinating reading.  Lepore compares Warren's book with Louis Brandeis's Other People's Money and How the Bankers Use It, which was published in 1914.  "Brandeis was concerned with Gilded Age plutocrats' use of people's bank savings to build giant, monopolistic conglomerates answerable not to the people but to shareholders."  The writings of the future Supreme Court Justice, well known for his "ability to enlist data in the service of a legal argument," which came to be known as the "Brandeis brief," were instrumental in the effort to reform antitrust law and regulate the financial industry.  Lepore argues that these reforms "in the middle decades of the [twentieth] century, made possible the growth of the middle class."

Unlike Brandeis, who focused on saving and monopolies, Warren focuses on borrowing and debt.  She is concerned about the collapse of the middle class.  Warren blames the rise in personal bankruptcy on credit card companies that "lured borrowers in with 'teaser rates,'" and on mortgage companies that sold "'mortgage products,' with low down payments, ballooning rates, and prepayment penalties."  After home prices skyrocketed and then plummeted, the middle class was left holding the bag.  Brandeis and Warren share the Progressive distrust of "legislatures and courts that have allowed the nation's social and economic policies to be made by corporations and bankers."

Warren shares some of her compelling personal story with her readers.  One vignette to which I could easily relate occurred in 1978.  Warren was holding her baby son on her hip trying to calm him down, while frying pork chops and keeping one eye on her daughter, who was coloring on the floor.  In the midst of this controlled chaos, she received a call from the University of Houston Law Center about a possible teaching position.  Somehow she made it through the conversation and got the job, the start of her academic career.

Like Brandeis, who worked to abolish child labor and to establish maximum-hour and minimum-wage laws for men and women, Warren is concerned about women, in particular "the unintended economic consequences that arise when women rearing children enter the paid labor force ... earning money has made women who are mothers more economically vulnerable, not less."  The two-income family has been hard hit--with two wage earners and low down payment requirements, middle-class families assumed larger mortgages than they could afford.  If one wage earner loses a job and the family is forced to live on one income, bankruptcy is the almost inevitable result.  The situation is aggravated if the family includes children.

A Fighting Chance will be published next week.  Warren denies that she is planning to challenge Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, but the publication of her autobiography is fueling the rumor machine.

A New Role for Professor Mann

If elected, Professor Elizabeth Warren would be the first female Senator from Massachusetts.  Her husband, Professor Bruce Mann, who also teaches at Harvard Law School, has been trying out a new role during the campaign--Elizabeth Warren's husband.  A recent article describes Professor Mann's contributions to the campaign and discusses the role of a candidate's husband, which is "less well-defined than that of a wife."  No one seems to know for sure what the expectations should be, or even what to call the husbands of successful female candidates.  In Alaska, for instance, Todd Palin was dubbed the "First Dude," which I always found to be lacking in dignity, but I guess it worked for the Palins, who were also lacking in dignity.

Professor Mann has taken a more low-key role than Gail Huff, Senator Scott Brown's wife and a well-known television reporter, who is campaigning full time this fall for her husband.  Professor Mann does events on his own, but they are usually not advertised to members of the press.  He sees "his role as helping people make the personal connection they need to support Warren."   Professor Mann is a highly respected legal historian.  His latest book, Republic of Debtors:  Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence, broke new ground in the history of debt in the United States in its analysis of how debt was transformed in the eyes of society from moral failure into economic failure.  This transformation led to the Bankruptcy Act of 1800, the first federal bankruptcy statute, and eventually to today's "fresh start" for debtors. 

Thanks to Pace Law School student Kyle T. Pero, a native of Massachusetts, for pointing out this article to me.

A New Role for Professor Warren

When I worked at the Biddle Law Library at the University of Pennsylvania, I served as the liaison librarian to Elizabeth Warren, who was teaching there at the time. She taught Contracts, Bankruptcy, and other commercial law subjects, and was one of the most popular professors at the school. Thanks to her strong communication skills, she had the ability to reach different audiences. Penn students loved her because she was an effective teacher, had a good sense of humor, and was very accessible. I remember her as having a great deal of common sense and little pretentiousness; she was grounded and down to earth. For the women students, Professor Warren was a role model, a woman who had a high-profile career while raising a family. In addition to all this, she is a serious scholar, especially in the area of bankruptcy law and policy. Her books, co-authored with Teresa Sullivan and Jay Westbrook--As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankrupcy and Consumer Credit in America and The Fragile Middle Class: Americans in Debt--were groundbreaking, among the first efforts to bring empirical research techniques to bankruptcy. "Crisscrossing the country, often with a portable photocopier strapped into the airplane seat next to her, Warren visited countless courthouses, where she pored over records and interviewed judges, lawyers, and often the debtors themselves. ... Warren ... paint[ed] a picture of an increasingly vulnerable middle class." Her work has shone a light on the disproportionately harsh effects of debt on women, and has encouraged other scholars to use court records as the raw material of their own research projects.

Professor Warren, who is now on the faculty of Harvard Law School, is a candidate for the Massachusetts Senate seat currently held by Scott Brown. She is the subject of an insightful profile in the current issue of New York Magazine. Dubbing her "the saint with sharp elbows," the profile highlights her trenchant criticism of the deregulation of Wall Street that began in the 1980s and

allowed "the big financial firms, the titans of Wall Street," to "start selling ever more dangerous mortgages, ever more dangerous credit cards, ever more dangerous car loans, which they then repackaged and sold again, producing, in addition to huge profits and bonuses, huge risk. After the market took a downturn, all that risk that's been built into the system starts to come home, somebody's got to pay, and those same CEOs on Wall Street basically turn around the American people and say, 'Whoa, there's a real problem here, and you better bail us out or we're all gonna die.' And so we did, that was TARP. And now we're about to write the last chapter in this narrative."

A passionate advocate on behalf of America's embattled middle class, Professor Warren was chosen by President Obama to set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was her brainchild, and most people assumed she would eventually be nominated to head it. President Obama chose not to appoint her, however, knowing that the confirmation process would be difficult if not impossible. It is worth noting that Obama's ultimate choice, Richard Cordray, is facing stiff opposition from the Republicans in Congress and may never be confirmed. The profile points out that Professor Warren has moved on from the disappointment and disillusionment she must have felt about not being nominated to head the CFPB, and is now hoping to channel her energy and intellect into "rebuilding America's middle class."

Professor Warren Takes on the Credit Industry

I had the pleasure of serving as the library liaison to Professor Elizabeth Warren when I worked at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She has since moved on to Harvard Law School, where she specializes in commercial law and bankruptcy law. Her treatises on bankruptcy have been very influential, drawing as they do on empirical methods to paint vivid portraits of real people caught in the web of debt. Threee of the best known are As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in America, The Fragile Middle Class: Americans in Debt, and The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke. Through her scholarship, she has helped to change the image of debtors, sometimes characterized as wastrels and spendthrifts, to that of victims of predatory lending practices. During the current debate over health care reform, one of the themes has been the number of people who have declared bankruptcy because of medical debt caused by lack of health insurance. Professor Warren has been instrumental in bringing this issue to the forefront of the debate.

She is the subject of an entertaining article in today's Boston Globe. Professor Warren came from a family that struggled after a series of financial reversals. Both of her parents worked, but things were always difficult for them. This experience helps her to empathize with other families that are struggling despite hard work. She has proposed a new federal agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which is the subject of a bill, H.R. 3126, that was introduced on July 8 by Representative Barney Frank. It passed the House Financial Services Committee on October 29, but faces opposition in the full House and Senate. If approved, the new agency would regulate consumer financial products, and is vehemently opposed by business groups. Some in the business community accuse Professor Warren of positioning herself to be the director of the agency if it comes into being, but she feels any such discussion is "premature." In the meantime, she continues to teach and to serve as TARP overseer.

Elizabeth Warren

When I worked at the University of Pennsylvania Law Library, I had the pleasure of knowing Professor Elizabeth Warren, a leading bankruptcy scholar, who has since left and now teaches at Harvard Law School. She is the subject of a recent Newsweek article, entitled "The Debt Crusader," describing her new post as head of the "Congressional Oversight Panel, the group that's critiquing the government's bank bailout and advising legislators on how to reform the financial system. For years Warren has been an outspoken critic of banks, and in this new job she's got her best chance yet to see her views turned into law. That's a prospect that pains financial lobbyists, who basically despise her." Why do these lobbyists hate Professor Warren? She has been an outspoken critic of the consumer credit industry for many years, believing that easy credit is at least part of the cause of the increase in personal bankruptcy. The article describes the Panel's work to date, and speculates about the direction in which the Panel might go in the future. Not everyone believes that Professor Warren is the right person to head up this group. For instance, a very critical Forbes.com article about the initial work of the Panel and Professor Warren was published yesterday.