Lauren E. Willis

BA, with high honors in general scholarship, Wesleyan University
JD, with distinction, Stanford Law School, Order of the Coif

Background

After law school, Lauren Willis clerked for the Office of the Solicitor General of the United States and for Judge Francis D. Murnaghan, Jr. of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.  Before coming to academia, Willis was a litigator in the Housing Section of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and worked with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission on predatory mortgage lending litigation.   

Willis joined the Loyola faculty in 2004.  She has also taught at Stanford Law School and the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She will be teaching at Harvard Law School for the 2013-2014 academic year. She was honored by Loyola’s graduating day class with the 2008 Excellence in Teaching award.  

Selected Scholarship

• When Nudges Fail: Slippery Defaults, 80 U. Chi. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2013)
• The Financial Education Fallacy, 101 American Econ. Rev. 429 (2011)
• Will the Mortgage Market Correct? How Households and Communities Would Fare If Risk Were Priced Well, 41 Conn. L. Rev. 1177 (2009)
• Against Financial Literacy Education, 94 Iowa L. Rev. 197 (2008)
• Decisionmaking and the Limits of Disclosure: The Problem of Predatory Lending: Price, 65 Maryland L. Rev. 707 (2006)

In the News

Willis has been interviewed by print, radio, television and internet media in the United States and abroad.  She occasionally writes op-eds.  This is a selection of her appearances in the news.

• What Do Hand-Washing and Financial Illiteracy Have in Common? Listen to Professor Willis on Freakonomics Radio (Jan. 19, 2012)
• A Price Tag Like Any Other, Huffington Post (Feb. 22, 2012)
• Question of the Week: Is Teaching Personal Finance Education in Schools a Waste of Time?, Guardian Sunday Observer, U.K. (Mar. 29, 2009)
• Bailout Should Also Help Renters, San Francisco Chronicle (Feb. 23, 2009)
• Eminent Domain, Post-Bailout, Daily Journal (Oct. 8, 2008)
• Sorting Through the Mortgage Muddle, Chicago Tribune (Aug. 26, 2007)
• The Fleecing of Black Borrowers, Washington Post (Oct. 8, 2006)

Public Service

Willis currently serves on the Advisory Committee to the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law Third, Consumer Contracts, on the Research Advisory Council for the Center for Responsible Lending and the Advisory Task Force for Citizen Works' Fair Contracts Project.  As the need arises, she also provides formal comments to a variety of bodies, such as the OECD Task Force on Financial Consumer Protection, the Federal Reserve Board, and other banking and consumer protection agencies.