Mehrsa Baradaran

Expertise:

Banking law, contracts, property, housing, inequality

Background:

Mehrsa Baradaran is a professor of law at UC Irvine Law.

Previously, she was the Robert Cotten Alston Chair in Corporate Law at the University of Georgia School of Law and the Robert Braucher Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard School of Law.

Baradaran writes about banking law, financial inclusion, inequality, and the racial wealth gap. Her scholarship includes the books The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America (Liveright/Norton Press 2024),The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap (Belknap/Harvard University Press 2017), and How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy (Harvard University Press 2015). The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap was awarded the Best Book of the Year by the Urban Affairs Association, the PROSE Award Honorable Mention in the Business, Finance & Management category. Baradaran was also selected as a finalist at the 2018 Georgia Author of the Year Awards for the book in the category of history/biography.

Baradaran has also published articles including “Jim Crow Credit” in the Irvine Law Review, “Regulation by Hypothetical” in the Vanderbilt Law Review, “It’s Time for Postal Banking” in the Harvard Law Review Forum, “Banking and the Social Contract” in the Notre Dame Law Review, “How the Poor Got Cut Out of Banking” in the Emory Law Journal, “Reconsidering the Separation of Banking and Commerce” in the George Washington Law Review and “The ILC and the Reconstruction of U.S. Banking” in the SMU Law Review. Of note, her article “The New Deal with Black America” was selected for presentation at the 2017 Stanford/Harvard/Yale Junior Faculty Forum.

Baradaran and her books have received significant national and international media coverage and have been featured in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Slate, American Banker, the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times; on National Public Radio’s “Marketplace,” C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” and Public Broadcasting Service’s “NewsHour;” and as part of TEDxUGA. The LA Times selected Baradaran in its list of top 100 Influential people . She has advised U.S. Senators and Congressmen on policy, testified before the U.S. Congress, and spoken at national and international forums like the U.S. Treasury and the World Bank. Baradaran was selected to serve on two Presidential Transition teams covering the US Treasury, Federal Reserve, and various banking agencies.

She earned her bachelor’s degree cum laude from Brigham Young University and her law degree from NYU, where she served as a member of the New York University Law Review.

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