Hi there!
So grateful that you’ve decided to follow the money with me with the goal of promoting transparency and opposing corruption. I’ve just renamed the newsletter “Money & Gossip” as an homage to the fabulous dark comedy series Succession. In a recent episode one of the characters said, “I thought these people would be complicated but they're not. It's basically just money and gossip.” Tis true.
I’m Jennifer Taub, a law professor, nonfiction author, cable news commentator, and host of the podcast Booked Up with Jen Taub. My nonfiction books include Big Dirty Money (Viking 2020) about white collar crime, and Other People’s Houses (Yale Press 2014) about the 2008 financial crisis.
I have testified as a banking law expert before Congress and appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and CNN’s Newsroom. Prior to joining academia, I was an associate general counsel with Fidelity Investments.
On the activism front, I was a co-founder and organizer of the April 15, 2017 Tax March where more than 120,000 people gathered in cities nationwide to demand President Donald Trump release his tax returns. There were inflatable chickens. You must remember.
You may have read my opinion pieces on variety of platforms including The Washington Monthly, The Washington Post, CNN opinion page, Slate, the New York Times Dealbook, Politico, Dame Magazine, The Baseline Scenario, Race to the Bottom, Pareto Commons, The Conglomerate, and Concurring Opinions.
Sure I’m chatty and and prone to the accidental F-bomb. But, I did pay my dues. Here are the receipts. In fall 2019, I was the Bruce W. Nichols Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and am now a professor of law at the Western New England University School of Law. I received my BA degree, cum laude, from Yale University, with distinction in the English major, where I was a features editor of the Yale Daily News, and JD, cum laude, from Harvard Law School where I was an editor at the Harvard Women’s Law Journal.
In addition, I am a co-author with the late Kathleen Brickey of Corporate and White Collar Crime: Cases and Materials, 6th and 7th editions (Wolters Kluwer 2017 and 2021).
In the area of banking and financial market regulation, my book Other People’s Houses: How Decades of Bailouts, Captive Regulators, and Toxic Bankers Made Home Mortgages a Thrilling Business was published in May 2014 by Yale University Press (and in paperback in 2015). Recognized as accessible and informative, OPH was honored by the Massachusetts Center for the Book as one of the 2015 finalists in the nonfiction category. Other People’s Houses was favorably mentioned by Nobel Laureate, Robert Shiller in his 2015 edition of Irrational Exuberance.
If you actually want to know more….here’s more
In 2016, I testified as an expert before the United States Senate Banking Committee and a United States House Financial Services Subcommittee. And I also co-organized a conference and co-lead a panel discussion at the Financial Stability Law Workshop at the U.S. Treasury Department, hosted by the Office of Financial Research.
If you’re still reading, there’s more to share. . .
In addition to Other People’s Houses, I have written extensively on the financial crisis. Those publications include “The Sophisticated Investor and the Global Financial Crisis” in the peer-reviewed Corporate Governance Failures (UPenn Press, 2011) and a case study on AIG in Robert A. G. Monks and Nell Minow’s fifth edition of Corporate Governance (Wiley, 2011). In response to Roberta Romano, I presented and wrote “Regulating in the Light: Harnessing Political Entrepreneurs’ Energy for Post-Crisis Sunlight Hearings” (St. Thomas L. Rev. 2015). Additional works include the chapter “Delay, Dilutions, and Delusions: Implementing the Dodd-Frank Act” in Restoring Shared Prosperity (2013) and “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Banking,” in the Handbook on the Political Economy of the Financial Crisis (Oxford, 2012). She wrote entries on “Shadow Banking” and “Financial Deregulation” for the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Business, Labor and Economic History (Oxford, 2013) and the chapter “Great Expectations for the Office of Financial Research,” in Will it Work? How Will We Know? The Future of Financial Reform (2010). In addition, I have published “Reforming the Banks” for Good in Dissent (2014). My article, “The Subprime Specter Returns: High Finance and the Growth of High-Risk Consumer Debt,” was published in the New Labor Forum (2015). And, I wrote a book chapter on “New Hopes and Hazards for Social Investment Crowdfunding” in Law and Policy for a New Economy (Edward Elgar, 2017).
My corporate governance work often focuses on the role of institutional investors, including mutual funds. My article “Able but Not Willing: The Failure of Mutual Fund Advisers to Advocate for Shareholders’ Rights,” published in the Journal of Corporation Law (2009) was presented at a conference jointly sponsored by the Millstein Center for Corporate Governance and the Oxford Said Business School. My article “Managers in the Middle: Seeing and Sanctioning Corporate Political Spending after Citizens United” was presented at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU and later published in the NYU Journal of Legislation and Public Policy (2012). My article, “Is Hobby Lobby a Tool for Limiting Corporate Constitutional Rights,” was presented at Harvard Law School and later published in a symposium issue of Constitutional Commentary in 2015 on Money, Politics, Corporations, and the Constitution (2015).
I have also ventured into the area of legal education and pedagogy. This includes the article “Unpopular Contracts and Why They Matter: Burying Langdell and Enlivening Students,” published in the Washington Law Review (2013). I am a co-author with Martha McCluskey and Frank Pasquale of “Law and Economics: Contemporary Approaches,” published in Yale Law & Policy Review (2016). With McCluskey and Pasquale, I was a co-founder of APPEAL (the Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and the Law), a research network linking economists, legal scholars, and policy makers concerned with inequality and instability who view markets and the government as mutually constituted.
I also served as chair of the Section on Financial Institutions and Consumer Financial Services for the 2017 AALS annual meeting. I was a visiting professor at the University of Illinois College of Law for a short course in 2015 and a visiting fellow at the Yale School of Management during the 2016 spring semester. She was a visiting professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law during the 2019 spring semester.
