LAW BRIEFS

PREDATORY LENDING LEGAL EXPERT
JOINS SUFFOLK LAW

ClickerKathleen C. Engel, a nationally recognized legal expert in the fields of predatory and subprime lending, will join Suffolk University Law School in July as professor of law.

“Kathleen Engel’s trailblazing scholarship identified the subprime crisis and promising avenues for reform long before the crisis became a regrettable reality in the United States,” says Suffolk Law professor Joseph Franco, who teaches Securities Regulation and related courses. “We are excited about welcoming her as a colleague and know that her ideas will continue to influence public discourse in this area. She will inspire students by demonstrating a genuine connection between the world of ideas and legal reform.”

Engel comes to Suffolk Law from Cleveland-Marshall College of Law at Cleveland State University, where she is the Leon M. and Gloria Plevin Associate Professor of Law.

Engel has been a vigorous advocate for a number of consumer-oriented reforms pertaining to abusive lending practices associated with residential mortgages. She served on President Barack Obama’s Housing Policy Committee during his presidential campaign and is a member of the Consumer Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors; was an advisor to the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland’s Academic Advisory Council on Subprime Lending; and is a member of the Americans for Fairness in Lending board of directors.

She has published extensively on the law and economics of predatory lending, mortgage discrimination, financial services reform, and the subprime and foreclosure crises. Her award-winning research and analyses of financial services markets and the laws that regulate them have been cited in Business Week, The Economist, Newsweek, and The Wall Street Journal. She is working with Professor Patricia McCoy of the University of Connecticut School of Law to complete the book The Subprime Virus, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2010.

She is an honors graduate from Smith College and the University of Texas School of Law. Following graduation from law school, she clerked for Judge Homer Thornberry of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Austin, Texas. She then practiced law at Burnham & Hines in Boston, where she primarily represented plaintiffs in civil rights and housing and employment discrimination cases.

“I am excited to join the Suffolk Law community and to participate in the school’s innovative programs, like the concentration in Business Law and Financial Services,” Engel says. “I also look forward to meeting my new students and exchanging ideas with the outstanding faculty who will be my colleagues at the law school.”

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