Elizabeth Warren

For other people named Elizabeth Warren, see Elizabeth Warren (disambiguation).

Elizabeth Warren
United States Senator from Massachusetts
Incumbent
Assumed office January 3, 2013 Serving with John Kerry
Preceded by	Scott Brown
Special Advisor for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
In office September 17, 2010 – August 1, 2011
President	Barack Obama
Preceded by	Position established
Succeeded by	Raj Date
Chairperson of the Congressional Oversight Panel
In office November 25, 2008 – November 15, 2010
Deputy	Damon Silvers
Preceded by	Position established
Succeeded by	Ted Kaufman
Personal details
Born	Elizabeth Ann Herring (1949-06-22) June 22, 1949 Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, U.S.
Political party	Republican (Before 1995) Democratic (1995–present)
Spouse(s)	Jim Warren (1968–1978) Bruce Mann (1980–present)
Children	Amelia Alexander
Alma mater	George Washington University University of Houston (B.S.) Rutgers University, Newark (J.D.)
Website	U.S. Senate website Campaign website

Elizabeth Ann Warren (née Herring; born June 22, 1949) is the junior United States Senator from Massachusetts and a member of the Democratic Party. Warren was previously a Harvard Law School professor specializing in bankruptcy law and is an active consumer protection advocate. Her work as a national policy advocate led to the conception and establishment of the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She has written a number of academic and popular works, and is a frequent subject of media interviews regarding the American economy and personal finance.

Born in Oklahoma City, Warren attended The George Washington University and the University of Houston. She received a J.D. from Rutgers School of Law–Newark in 1976, and went on to teach law at several universities before joining Harvard in the early 1990s.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Warren served as chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel created to oversee the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). She later served as Assistant to the President and Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under President Barack Obama. In the late 2000s she was recognized by publications such as the National Law Journal and the Time 100 as an increasingly influential public policy figure.

In September 2011, Warren announced her candidacy for the U.S. Senate, challenging Republican incumbent Scott Brown. She won the general election on November 6, 2012, and is the first woman to sit as the senator from Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate. Warren has been assigned a seat on the Senate Banking Committee.

Early life, education, marriage, and family

Warren was born on June 22, 1949, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, to working class parents Pauline (née Reed) and Donald Jones Herring. She was their fourth child, with three older brothers. When she was twelve, her father, a janitor, had a heart attack, which led to many medical bills and a pay cut because he could not do his previous work. Eventually this led to the loss of their car from failure to make loan repayments. To help the family finances her mother found work in the catalog-order department at Sears and Elizabeth began working as a waitress at her aunt's restaurant.

She became a star member of the debate team at Northwest Classen High School and won the title of "Oklahoma's top high-school debater" while competing with debate teams from high schools throughout the state. She also won a debate scholarship to George Washington University at the age of 16. Initially aspiring to be a teacher, she left GWU after two years to marry her high-school boyfriend, Jim Warren.

She moved to Houston with her husband, who was a NASA engineer. There she enrolled in the University of Houston and was graduated in 1970 with a degree in speech pathology and audiology. For a year, she taught children with disabilities in a public school, based on an "emergency certificate", as she had not taken the education courses required for a regular teaching certificate.

Warren and her husband moved to New Jersey for his work, where she decided to become a stay-at-home mom after becoming pregnant with their first child. After her daughter turned two, Warren enrolled at the Rutgers School of Law–Newark. She worked as a summer associate at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft. Shortly before her graduation in 1976, Warren became pregnant with her second child, and began to work as a lawyer from home, writing wills and doing real estate closings.

After having two children, Amelia and Alexander, she and Jim Warren divorced in 1978. In 1980, Warren married Bruce Mann, a Harvard law professor, but retained the surname, Warren.

Elizabeth Warren has written two books and several articles with her daughter Amelia.

Academic career

During the late-1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s, Warren taught law at several universities throughout the country, while researching issues related to bankruptcy and middle-class personal finance. Warren taught at the Rutgers School of Law–Newark from 1977-1978, the University of Houston Law Center from 1978–1983, and the University of Texas School of Law from 1981-1987, in addition to teaching at the University of Michigan as a visiting professor in 1985 and as a research associate at the University of Texas at Austin from 1983-1987.

She joined the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1987 and became a tenured professor. She began teaching at Harvard Law School in 1992, as a visiting professor, and began a permanent position as Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law in 1995.

In 1995 Warren was asked to advise the National Bankruptcy Review Commission. She helped to draft the commission's report and worked for several years to oppose legislation intended to severely restrict the right of consumers to file for bankruptcy. Warren and others opposing the legislation were not successful; in 2005 Congress passed the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005.

From November 2006 to November 2010, Warren was a member of the FDIC Advisory Committee on Economic Inclusion. She is a member of the National Bankruptcy Conference, an independent organization which advises the U.S. Congress on bankruptcy law. She is a former Vice-President of the American Law Institute and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Public life

Warren has had a high public profile; she has appeared in the documentary films, Maxed Out and Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story. She has appeared numerous times on television programs including Dr. Phil and The Daily Show, and has been interviewed frequently on cable news networks, radio programs, and websites.

Books and other works

Warren has written several books, including All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan, coauthored with her daughter, Amelia Tyagi.

Warren and Tyagi wrote The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke. Warren and Tyagi point out that a fully employed worker today earns less inflation-adjusted income than a fully employed worker did 30 years ago. Although families spend less today on clothing, appliances, and other consumption, the costs of core expenses such as mortgages, health care, transportation, and child care have increased dramatically. The result is, that even with two income-earners, families are no longer able to save and they have incurred greater and greater debt.

In an article in The New York Times, Jeff Madrick said of Warren's book:

The authors find that it is not the free-spending young or the incapacitated elderly who are declaring bankruptcy so much as families with children... their main thesis is undeniable. Typical families often cannot afford the high-quality education, health care, and neighborhoods required to be middle class today. More clearly than anyone else, I think, Ms. Warren and Ms. Tyagi have shown how little attention the nation and our government have paid to the way Americans really live.

Writing in Time magazine, Maryanna Murray Buechner said of Warren's book:

For families looking for ways to cope, Warren and Tyagi mainly offer palliatives: Buy a cheaper house. Squirrel away a six-month cash cushion. Yeah, right. But they also know that there are no easy solutions. Readers who are already committed to a house and parenthood will find little to mitigate the deflating sense that they have nowhere to go but down.

In 2005, Warren and David Himmelstein published a study on bankruptcy and medical bills, which found that half of all families filing for bankruptcy did so in the aftermath of a serious medical problem. They say that three quarters of such families had medical insurance. This study was widely cited in policy debates, although some have challenged the study's methods and offered alternative interpretations of the data, suggesting that only seventeen percent of bankruptcies are directly attributable to medical expenses.

Government work

TARP oversight

On November 14, 2008, Warren was appointed by United States Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to chair the five-member Congressional Oversight Panel created to oversee the implementation of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act. The Panel released monthly oversight reports that evaluated the government bailout and related programs. During Warren's tenure, these reports covered foreclosure mitigation, consumer and small business lending, commercial real estate, AIG, bank stress tests, the impact of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) on the financial markets, government guarantees, the automotive industry, and other topics.

Warren stands next to President Barack Obama as he announces the nomination of Richard Cordray as the first director of the CFPB

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Warren was an early advocate for the creation of a new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The bureau was established by the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act signed into law by President Obama in July 2010. In anticipation of the agency's formal opening, for the first year after the bill's signing, Warren worked on implementation of the bureau as a special assistant to the president. While liberal groups and consumer advocacy groups pushed for Obama to nominate Warren as the agency's permanent director, Warren was strongly opposed by financial institutions and by Republican members of Congress who believed Warren would be an overly zealous regulator. Reportedly convinced that Warren could not win Senate confirmation as the bureau's first director, Obama turned to former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray and in January 2012, over the objections of Republican Senators, appointed Cordray to the post in a "recess appointment".

U.S. Senate

2012 election

See also: United States Senate election in Massachusetts, 2012

Warren at a campaign event

On September 14, 2011, Warren declared her intention to run for the Democratic nomination for the 2012 election in Massachusetts for the United States Senate. The seat had been won by Republican Scott Brown in a 2010 special election after the death of Ted Kennedy. A week later, a video of Warren speaking in Andover gained attention on the internet and became a viral video.

In it, Warren replies to the charge that asking the rich to pay more taxes is "class warfare", pointing out that no one grew rich in America without depending on infrastructure paid for by the rest of society, stating:

"There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own – nobody. ... You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless – keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along." President Obama echoed her sentiments later in 2012 in a speech made famous for the phrase, "You didn't build that".

Results by Municipality.

Warren ran unopposed for the Democratic nomination, and won it on June 2, 2012, at the state Democratic convention with a record 95.77% of the votes of delegates. She was endorsed by the Governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick. Warren and her opponent Scott Brown agreed to engage in four televised debates, including one with a consortium of media outlets in Springfield and one on WBZ-TV in Boston.

In April 2012, the Boston Herald drew attention to Warren's law directory entries from 1986 to 1995, in which she had self-identified as a Native American. Harvard Law School had publicized the entries in the 1990s in response to criticisms about a lack of faculty diversity. In 1999 Harvard began to publish its affirmative action plan on its website. The report for that year lists a single Native American senior professor, presumably Elizabeth Warren. The Harvard document defines Native American as “a person having origins in any of the original peoples of North America and who maintains cultural identification through tribal affiliation or community recognition,’’ a definition that Warren does not appear to fit. Warren said that she was unaware that Harvard had been promoting her purported Native American heritage until she read about it in a newspaper. The New England Historical Genealogical Society found no documentary proof of Native American lineage. Warren has never offered documentation but insists that her beliefs of Cherokee heritage are based on family lore alone. Warren’s three siblings have backed her claim, stating, "We grew up listening to our mother and grandmother and other relatives talk about our family’s Cherokee and Delaware heritage." A number of her cousins echo Warren’s assertion, but other cousins say they know nothing of Native American ancestry. The Brown campaign, called on her to "come clean about her motivations for making these claims and explain the contradictions between her rhetoric and the record", and several Cherokee groups came out against her. Warren maintained that Native American ancestry was a part of her family folklore, and that she had self-identified as a minority in the law directory listing in hopes of meeting people of a similar background. She has stated that she has not received any professional advantage or preferential treatment as a result of her claimed ancestry and colleagues and supervisors at the schools where she has worked have publicly supported her statements. There is nothing in the federally required documents that contradicts those statements. Charles Fried, a Harvard Law professor who was involved in Warren's hiring, said that her heritage was never mentioned and played no role in the decision. After being sworn into the Senate, she did not self-identify as a Native American in the official Senate directory.

Warren encountered significant opposition from business interests, with a United States Chamber of Commerce representative claiming in August that "no other candidate in 2012 represents a greater threat to free enterprise than Professor Warren." She nonetheless raised $39 million for her campaign, the most of any Senate candidate in 2012.

Warren received a primetime speaking slot at the 2012 Democratic National Convention, immediately before Bill Clinton, on the evening of September 5, 2012. Warren positioned herself as a champion of a beleaguered middle class that "has been chipped, squeezed, and hammered." According to Warren, "People feel like the system is rigged against them. And here's the painful part: They're right. The system is rigged." Warren said that Wall Street CEOs "wrecked our economy and destroyed millions of jobs" and that they "still strut around congress, no shame, demanding favors, and acting like we should thank them."

Tenure

On November 6, 2012, Warren defeated incumbent Scott Brown with a total of 53.7% of the votes. She is the first woman ever elected as a U.S. senator from Massachusetts. Warren was sworn in by Vice President Joe Biden on January 3, 2013.

In December 2012, Warren was assigned a seat on the Senate Banking Committee – the committee that oversees the implementation of Dodd-Frank and other regulation of the banking industry.

Recognition

Warren at the 2009 reception for Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World

In 2009, the Boston Globe named her the Bostonian of the Year, and the Women's Bar Association of Massachusetts honored her with the Lelia J. Robinson Award. She was named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2009 and 2010. The National Law Journal repeatedly has named Warren as one of the Fifty Most Influential Women Attorneys in America, and in 2010 it honored her as one of the 40 most influential attorneys of the decade. In 2011, Elizabeth Warren was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame. In January 2012, Warren was named a "Top-20 U.S. Progressive" by the New Statesman, a magazine based in the United Kingdom.

In 2009, Warren became the first professor in Harvard's history to win the law school's The Sacks-Freund Teaching Award for a second time. She delivered the commencement address at the Rutgers School of Law–Newark in May 2011, where she was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree and was conferred membership into the Order of the Coif.

Publications

Selected articles

• Warren, E. (1987). "Bankruptcy Policy". The University of Chicago Law Review. 54 (3): 775–814. JSTOR 1599826.
• Warren, E. (1992). "The Untenable Case for Repeal of Chapter 11". The Yale Law Journal. 102 (2): 437–479. JSTOR 796843.
• Warren, E. (1993). "Bankruptcy Policymaking in an Imperfect World". Michigan Law Review. 92 (2): 336–387. JSTOR 1289668.
• "Principled Approach to Consumer Bankruptcy". American Bankruptcy Law Journal. 71: 483. 1997.
• "The Bankruptcy Crisis". Indiana Law Journal. 73 (4): 1079. Fall 1998.
• Warren, Elizabeth; Westbrook, Jay Lawrence (January 2000). "Financial Characteristics of Businesses in Bankruptcy". SSRN Electronic Journal. 73: 499. doi:10.2139/ssrn.194750. {{cite journal}}: More than one of |work= and |journal= specified (help)
• Himmelstein, DU; Warren, E; Thorne, D; Woolhandler, S (2005). "Illness and injury as contributors to bankruptcy". Health affairs (Project Hope). Suppl Web Exclusives: W5–63–W5–73. doi:10.1377/hlthaff.w5.63. PMID 15689369.
• "The Vanishing Middle Class". In Edwards, John, ed. (2007). Ending Poverty in America: How to Restore the American Dream. The New Press. ISBN 978-1-59558-176-1.
• Himmelstein, David U.; Warren, Elizabeth; Thorne, Deborah; Woolhandler, Steffie J. (2005). "Illness and Injury as Contributors to Bankruptcy". SSRN Electronic Journal. doi:10.2139/ssrn.664565.
• Himmelstein, DU; Thorne, D; Warren, E; Woolhandler, S (2009). "Medical bankruptcy in the United States, 2007: Results of a national study". The American Journal of Medicine. 122 (8): 741–6. doi:10.1016/j.amjmed.2009.04.012. PMID 19501347.

Books

• As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in America. Oxford University Press. 1989. ISBN 978-0-19-505578-8. (with Teresa A. Sullivan and Jay Westbrook)
• The Fragile Middle Class: Americans in Debt. Yale University Press. 2001. ISBN 978-0-300-09171-7. (with Teresa A. Sullivan and Jay Westbrook)
• The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents are Going Broke. Basic Books. 2004. ISBN 978-0-465-09090-7. (with Amelia Warren Tyagi)
• All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan. Simon and Schuster. 2006. ISBN 978-0-7432-6988-9. (with Amelia Warren Tyagi)
• Casenote Legal Briefs: Commercial Law. Aspen Publishers. 2006. ISBN 978-0-7355-5827-4. (with Lynn M. LoPucki, Daniel Keating, Ronald Mann, and Normal Goldenberg)
• The Law of Debtors and Creditors: Text, Cases, and Problems (6th ed.). Aspen Publishers. 2008. ISBN 978-0-7355-7626-1. (with Jay Westbrook)
• Chapter 11: Reorganizing American Businesses (Essentials). Aspen Publishers. 2008. ISBN 978-0-7355-7654-4.
• Secured Credit: A Systems Approach. Wolters Kluwer. 2008. ISBN 978-0-7355-7649-0. (with Lynn M. LoPucki)

See also

• Social class in the United States

Notes

References

External links

• U.S. Senate website
• Elizabeth Warren U.S. Senate campaign website
• Bibliography at harvard
• Biography at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
• Financial information (federal office) at the Federal Election Commission
• Profile at Vote Smart