CFPB People

Subscribe to CFPB People via RSS

Leonard Chanin, Assistant Director of the CFPB’s Office of Regulations, is leaving the CFPB to return to private practice.  

Leonard’s departure comes at a critical time because of the myriad of regulations the CFPB must finalize by January 21 of next year. Before joining the CFPB, Mr. Chanin worked in the Fed’s Division of Consumer and Community Affairs, where he served as the Division’s Deputy Director, and he was among the more senior of the Division’s attorneys who moved to the CFPB.  … Continue Reading

Christopher L Peterson, the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor of Law at the S.J. Quinney College of Law of the University of Utah, has taken a leave of absence to become (as of yesterday) an “Enforcement Analyst” at the CFPB. Professor Peterson is best known for his articles, speeches and expert testimony attacking the Mortgage Electronic Registration System (MERS).… Continue Reading

On April 30, the CFPB announced the appointment of Stuart Ishimaru as Director of the CFPB’s Office of Minority and Women Inclusion (OMWI). As we reported,  the Dodd-Frank Act required the CFPB and various other federal agencies including the Fed, Treasury, OCC, FDIC, NCUA, SEC and FHFA, to establish an OMWI.… Continue Reading

Recently a government watchdog organization known as Judicial Watch obtained, via a Freedom of Information Act request, a large number of documents about Richard Cordray, President Obama’s choice as Director of the CFPB. Among the more than 200 documents disclosed was an internal CFPB e-mail entitled “Weekly Message: and dated February 6, 2012, in which Mr.… Continue Reading

On Tuesday April 17, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) announced that he and other Senate Republicans intend to file a brief amicus curiae in a case challenging the validity of President Obama’s January 4 recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board. The case, Noel Canning v. NLRB, challenges an NLRB cease and desist order relating to a purported refusal to bargain, and is currently pending before the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C.… Continue Reading

Until someone has standing to challenge President Obama’s recess appointment of Richard Cordray as Director of the Bureau, people with an interest in the issue have been following challenges to Obama’s three contemporaneous recess appointments to the NLRB. Last week, in the first of two cases making such a challenge, Judge Amy Berman Jackson avoided deciding the constitutional question, which she characterized as a “political dispute” without invoking the political question doctrine, and relied instead on procedural and substantive labor law grounds.… Continue Reading

Two recent presentations by CFPB Director Richard Cordray strike me as being “blog-worthy.” First, Director Cordray reported to Congress that the CFPB received $180.2 million of funding from the Federal Reserve System in fiscal years 2010 and 2011 and received an additional $94.3 million in the first quarter of fiscal 2012 (the final quarter of calendar 2011).… Continue Reading

As Alan Kaplinsky recently noted, a challenge brought against the NLRB could well become an indirect vehicle for calling into question the validity of President Obama’s recess appointment of Richard Cordray to head the CFPB. Even as he wrote that blog, a case was pending in federal district court before Judge Amy Berman Jackson in the District of Columbia that may now become that vehicle.… Continue Reading

Two days after President Obama’s January 4 recess appointments to the NLRB and the CFPB, DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel (“OLC”) issued a 23-page opinion (not publicly released until January 12) on the legality of those appointments (the “Opinion”). Written against a backdrop of pro forma Senatorial sessions which began in 2007 in the Bush administration and continue during the current administration, the Opinion addresses two issues: (1) whether the President had authority to make recess appointments during the recess that included January 4, 2012, and (2) whether the pro forma sessions disabled him from making such recess appointments.… Continue Reading