Consumer Financial Protection Agency

Written by Katie Porter Law scholarship has a proud tradition of actually influencing the law. This remains true today, notwithstanding proclaimations of some in the legal academy who make proclamations about how their work is "highly theoretical" to hide shortcomings in translating their ideas in meaningful ways to policymakers and everyday people. Right now pending before Congress is an excellent example of how academic work, published in a law review, can become real law. A few years ago, Elizabeth Warren and Oren Bar-Gill authored an article in the Penn Law Review called Making Credit Safer. It was a "real" law review article in the best and worst sense of our scholarly form: 97 pages, 328 footnotes, exploring every nook and cranny of an idea. The idea, that America needs an agency devoted to protecting consumers from financial products, is about to become law, having been included in both the House and Senate versions of the financial reform bill. For progressive law scholars, this example of how to move an idea from a law review to a law offers some valuable tactical lessons: First, be persistent. Even the best ideas, even under the most opportune circumstances, take time to catch on. Elizabeth Warren first wrote about a Consumer Financial Protection Agency in the summer of 2007. Three years later, it's going to be become law. But I think a decade is a more realistic time frame for advancing ideas, especially those that sharply refute the existing paradigm. Write about your idea, and then write about it again, and then write about it some more.