Climbing Above the Culture Clash

BU Law Looks at the Economy
Leading From the Outside:
Ivory Tower Offers Objective View of Economic Crisis, Says Hurley
Four years ago, Cornelius “Con”
Hurley arrived at BU with a vision.
As the new director of the Morin Center
for Banking and Financial Law, he
wanted to make the 30-year-old graduate
program into more than just an academic
training ground for lawyers. He also
wanted it to be a player on the national
scene — a thought leader in the world
of national and international finance.
“The graduate program was already
very successful,” said Hurley. “But there
was greater potential, and we made a
conscious decision that it would be
better for the Morin Center and for the
law school in general if we did more
things that addressed the practical world.
It’s fine to run a graduate program,
but making a real contribution to the
ongoing debate is where it’s at.”
His timing couldn’t have been better.
Two years into his tenure, the bottom
fell out of the world’s financial
markets; several of the nation’s largest
banks were poised to sink under the
weight of bad loans, threatening
to pull the rest of the nation’s
financial system down with them.
Suddenly banking law and regulation
was no longer the esoteric concern of an
elite club of experts, but of vital interest
to every American. It was, and still is,
the biggest economic plight facing the
United States since the Great Depression.
With two years of preparation under
Hurley’s leadership, the Morin Center
was ideally positioned to step into
the tumult. Hurley himself — a
plainspoken man with a flair for
cutting to the bones of an issue with
an air of insightful congeniality — has
become one of the go-to experts for
media outlets around the country.
Hurley said his position at the Morin
Center puts him in a unique position
to provide unbiased commentary,
because he has no client interests to
advocate for or political administrations
to satisfy — yet he has decades
of experience in the industry.
Hurley sits with more than a dozen
other lawyers on the American Bar
Association’s task force on financial
regulatory reform. It is this task force
that will weigh in on reform issues
on behalf of the legal profession and
the ABA. According to Hurley, “Not
having the ‘burden’ of client interests is
quite useful as we consider the shape of
the financial industry going forward.”
Hurley brings this same approach to
his service as an “independent director”
of the Federal Home Loan Bank of
Boston. One of his colleagues on that
board, Arthur Connelly, chairman of
the American Bankers Association,
said, “We can count on Con to
move the discussion in a positive and
strategically helpful direction.”
Said Hurley, “The ‘Ivory Tower’
has become a pejorative term these
days, but the Ivory Tower is not
such a bad perch for assessing what
we’re going through right now.”
The Morin Center oversees the
publication of the Review of Banking and
Financial Law twice a year, co-sponsors
a series of three-day financial CLE
programs in partnership with the ABA,
and hosts a lecture series that has featured
some of the most powerful individuals
in the financial world, including the vice
chairman of Citigroup, the chairman
of the New York Stock Exchange, and
Congressman Barney Frank, chairman of
the House Financial Services Committee.
But without a doubt, the Morin Center’s
most popular and timely program is
“The Buck Starts Here,” a twice-amonth
luncheon forum for lawyers,
regulators and business leaders that uses
a fast-paced and innovative format to
stimulate insightful discussion of the
hottest financial topics of the moment.
The two-hour program begins with a
summary of the developments since
the last session, followed by a “drill
down” session on a particular hotbutton
issue. It concludes with a Q&A
session with panelists who include law
firm partners, regulatory officials and
business CEOs. Topics have ranged
from Ponzi schemes to hedge fund
regulation to the future of securitization.
“Each session is videotaped and posted
on the Morin Center’s Web site for the
whole world to see,” noted Hurley.
One recent program focused on
President Obama’s proposed Consumer
Financial Protection Agency, specifically
on a proposal to eliminate federal
pre-emption laws so states could
enact their own stricter regulations.
The topic elicited a lively debate as
to whether the plan would improve
regulation — or create utter chaos.
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