Graduate Program in Banking & Financial Law

The Morin Center for Banking & Financial Law

The Morin Center for Banking & Financial Law was founded to develop research and educational programs in the areas of law governing banking and financial services. The Morin Center’s mission is to provide, within Boston University, an organization for encouraging, managing and recognizing education and research in the field of banking and financial services law. It reflects the international aspects of financial services, seeks to marry academic excellence with practical application, and fosters a community of scholarship and dialogue on legal issues critical to the financial community. The Morin Center’s Board of Advisors, made up of distinguished practitioners from all sectors of the financial services industry, provides an important practical perspective to the development of the center’s educational mission.

The work of the Morin Center is threefold. The center:

Administers the Graduate Program in Banking & Financial Law and contributes to the academic and scholarly life of Boston University School of Law through lectures and other academic activities focusing on banking and financial services law
Conducts legal education programs, seminars, and symposia open to the public
Conducts research in the dynamic field of financial services law and policy. The Center publishes the Review of Banking and Financial Law.

The Morin Center Board of Advisors

The Center is guided in its work by the Board of Advisors of which the current members are:

Chair

Richard M. Whiting, Esq.
Executive Director and General Counsel, The Financial Services Roundtable

Members

Scott G. Alvarez, Esq.
Washington, D.C.
Thomas E. Cimeno, Esq.
Member, Board of Directors, Fidelity Management Trust Company
Jill M. Considine
Chairman, Butterfield Fulcrum Group
Eric R. Fischer, Esq.
Goodwin Procter LLP
Lena Goldberg, Esq.
Former Executive Vice President and General Counsel, Fidelity Investments
John P. Hamill, Esq.
Member, Board of Directors, Sovereign Bancorp
David F. Hannon, Esq.
Craig and Macauley PC
John D. Hawke, Jr., Esq.
Arnold & Porter LLP
Edward D. Herlihy, Esq.
Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz
Glen R. Johnson
President, Multitrust Funds, Federated Securities Corporation
William P. Mayer, Esq.
Goodwin Procter LLP
Carter K. McDowell, Esq.
Chief Legislative Counsel, Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association
Karen McMillan, Esq.
General Counsel, Investment Company Institute
Ernest T. Patrikis, Esq.
White & Case LLP
Paul Allan Schott, Esq.
The World Bank
James C. Orr, Esq.
The Bretton Woods Committee
James E. Scott, Esq.
Executive Director, Legal and Compliance, Morgan Stanley
John W. Teolis, Esq.
Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP
Donald F. Terry, Esq.
Former Manager, Multilateral Investment Fund, Inter-American Development Bank
John R. Towers, Esq.
Former Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, State Street Corporation
Ko-Yung Tung, Esq.
Morris and Foerster LLP

Leadership

We have witnessed upheavals in the financial markets on an unprecedented scale. The world’s largest financial companies have been shaken to their foundations, and some have left the scene. Because the legal and regulatory underpinnings of the financial system have been called into question, a new architecture is being created both for the American and global financial markets.

We at the Morin Center are intimately involved in helping to shape the financial world of the future. That future will offer opportunities in abundance for committed lawyers and other professionals who are familiar with the fundamentals of the industry and the regulatory and supervisory environment in which it operates.

Despite the challenges, there has never been a better time to get an education in this dynamic and exciting field. As the plans for tomorrow’s financial world are re-drawn, the leadership role of the financial services lawyer has never been more crucial.

If you agree with us, we hope that you will consider joining our elite global network of alumni whose lives and careers have been enriched by their experience at the Morin Center and the Graduate Program in Banking & Financial Law.

Graduate Program in Banking & Financial Law

Be at the forefront of banking and financial law

BU Law has specialized in banking and financial law since 1978, when it established the Morin Center for Banking & Financial Law. In 1984, the Morin Center launched the first program in the country leading to a graduate degree in banking law. Today, it is the only financial services LLM program with its own curriculum, courses and faculty. All courses are designed specifically for graduate study.

The Graduate Program in Banking & Financial Law prepares domestic and foreign-trained lawyers for leadership positions in the American and international banking and financial services industries. Ideal candidates are financial services lawyers who bring their expertise to the classroom and who want to improve their skills in today’s rapidly changing world of financial services law. The program, which may be taken on a full- or part-time basis, is also appropriate for attorneys seeking to begin a new career after spending the first part of their professional lives in another legal field.

You can prepare for the constant changes taking place in banking and financial services law. Because of the changes in the financial markets, the legal and regulatory structure of the financial system is being redesigned and rebuilt. We at the Morin Center are participating in shaping the financial world of the future by engaging in the debate and educating those who will be leaders in this dynamic and important industry.

You can gain a practical edge in financial services work. The skills you develop will be honed by a faculty drawn from law firms, government agencies and financial services companies in Boston, New York, and other financial centers. You will receive solid grounding in the real-life aspects of deal making as well as the theoretical basis of financial services law. You will take most of your classes with other accomplished legal professionals and be taught by practitioners with a wealth of experience.

You will be immersed in a thoughtful and focused curriculum that provides exposure to the principal areas of banking and financial services law. You will develop a well-rounded perspective from three types of courses: regulatory, transactional and business-oriented.

You will be connected to the nation’s leading center for banking and financial law studies. The program is administered by—and central to the mission of—the Morin Center for Banking & Financial Law. You will take part in the center’s conferences and activities while being encouraged to become part of the staff of the Morin Center’s Review of Banking & Financial Law, a student-run journal that has been in continuous publication for more than a quarter of a century.

You will become part of a global alumni network of financial services leaders. The program’s 1,700 graduates have assumed leadership roles around the globe in banking, financial services, law, and government. Our alumni form a cohesive professional global network that is unmatched.

Focus

This program has a focused curriculum consisting solely of graduate-level courses, and remains unique among LLM programs in the country. The course of study, consisting of subjects focusing on banking, securities, and insurance, leads to the conferment of the Master of Laws in Banking & Financial Law degree.

The faculty of the program is drawn from a combination of legal practitioners, financial services professionals, and academics who give students the benefit of both depth and breadth not only in the theory but, more importantly, in the practice of contemporary banking and financial services law. The Graduate Program strives to give each student a solid grounding in the real-life aspects of deal-making and finding solutions to complex transactions.

The course offerings are focused and seek to give the student a thorough understanding of financial services law through a combination of regulatory, transactional, and business-oriented courses. Students may choose to further refine their studies by choosing from among the concentrations offered in the program: American Banking & Financial Law, Compliance Management, Financial Services Transactions, International Banking & Financial Law, Lending & Credit Transactions, and Securities Transactions.

Students will have the opportunity not only to learn in the classroom but also to participate in internship and scholarship opportunities as well as become involved in the community through mentoring and teaching financial literacy to high school students.

We believe that molding experts can be achieved only through an intense experience where the student is immersed in the issues and exposed to various viewpoints.

Dialogue

Evolving new ideas is the task of every great university. The Morin Center contributes to this principally through the Edward Lane-Reticker Speaker Series, a series of lectures where leaders in the fields of banking, finance and public policy stimulate debate and discussion on timely issues.

The Morin Center has also embarked on research projects on various topics, which have included subjects ranging from the Investment Company Act of 1940 to the administration of pension fund and trust assets by financial institutions, from regulatory and enforcement attitudes toward the compliance function within diversified financial institutions to the future of financial institutions in Massachusetts.

Service

The law never stands still. Because of recent events, a new financial order is slowly being put in place. To help members of the bar, the Morin Center and the American Bar Association offer continuing legal education programs such as Banking Law Basics, Investment Management Basics, and Consumer Financial Services Basics which provide practitioners with an understanding of the basic laws and regulations governing the financial services industry.

The Morin Center also works very closely with the Financial Services Roundtable and the Boston Bar Association on issues affecting the banking and financial services industry.

Publication

In 1982, the Morin Center began publishing the Review of Banking & Financial Law, the nation’s preeminent student-run banking and financial law journal. The Review includes professional articles written by the field’s leading authorities, notes and comments written by third-year JD students and a summary of recent financial law developments authored entirely by second-year JD and LLM students.

Each year, the Review provides a forum for cutting-edge legal debate and addresses dynamic financial issues affecting both domestic and international systems. Past volumes have probed changes in constitutional, general corporate, securities, consumer protection, and administrative law.

The Review has recently published its 29th volume. With the astonishingly rapid pace of developments in banking and financial services, we can expect the Review to provide a venue for scholarship for years to come.

The Internship Experience

The Morin Center launched the Financial Services Internship course to give students real-world experience in the practice of financial services law. During their second semester, foreign and domestic students doing the concentration in Financial Services Transactions may work at a law firm, financial services organization or regulatory agency under the supervision of a lawyer and a faculty advisor. Students have interned at the following firms and agencies in the Boston area:

ACCION International
Bank of America
Brown Brothers Harriman
Citizens Bank
Computershare, Inc.
Craig & Macauley PC
General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
Federal Reserve Bank of Boston
John Hancock Wealth Management
Merrill Lynch
Neighborhood of Affordable Housing
Nutter McClennen & Fish LLP
Securities & Exchange Commission
Sovereign Bank
State Street Bank

The Morin Center International Development Law Fellowships

The world of financial services is normally associated with high-powered deals that move the capital markets across the globe. However, there is a side to financial services that affects millions of people that isn’t normally seen. Every day, financial services lawyers craft solutions to alleviate poverty through microfinance and support to small- and medium-scale enterprises. Financial services law is a tool to do good—and that thought is not lost on the Morin Center or its students.

We have teamed up with the International Development Law Organization (IDLO) to sponsor students to spend a summer working on microfinance projects around the world. For the past few years, students has joined the IDLO in projects in Rome, Italy and Buenos Aires, Argentina.

We hope to send more in the coming years. This program is open to students and recent alumni of the Morin Center who have expressed a desire to do development law work.

Growth

Every student in the Graduate Program is expected to excel while immersed in the life of the Morin Center. Whether as a member of the Review or as a lecturer in the Student Brown Bag Lecture Series, each student is challenged to make his or her year in the Graduate Program both a professional and personal growth experience.

Network

Including more than 1,700 alumni all over the world, most of whom are focused on banking and financial services, the program’s graduates form a cohesive professional network that is unmatched. Many have assumed leadership roles in banking, financial services, law and government.

With each class that graduates, the Morin Center hopes to transform tomorrow’s world of financial services—one lawyer at a time.

Morin Center Activities

Ahead of the Pack

A year before the implosion of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, the Morin Center published a major study entitled The Compliance Function in Diversified Financial Institutions calling for investment banks to be examined and regulated in the same way as commercial banks. At the time of our study, other reports, including those coming out of the Treasury Department, Harvard University, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the offices of Senator Charles Schumer and Mayor Michael Bloomberg were claiming that the financial services industry in the U.S. was over-regulated and that rules had to be loosened up to make our institutions more competitive globally. We didn’t buy it. In the fall of 2008, when the administration shifted its Toxic Assets Relief Program from buying toxic assets to injecting capital in banks, we pointed out that board seats ought to accompany the Treasury’s acquisition of major stock positions in the country’s largest financial firms. And, as the government tossed about for a coherent “too big to fail” policy, expending hundreds of billions of dollars in the process, the center’s director, Professor Cornelius K. Hurley, was pointing the way for a coherent approach to the vexing issue of systemic risk.

At the Morin Center, we don’t mind being out of step. Sometimes that means being ahead of the pack.

For more than thirty years, the center has been noted primarily as the only destination for earning a Master of Laws degree (LLM) in Banking & Financial Law. Our more than 1,700 graduates span the globe and hold influential positions in government, law firms, NGOs, and financial institutions of all types. Established in 1978, the Morin Center for Banking & Financial Law was intended to be a thought and research leader on pressing issues relevant to the banking industry. In 1982, the first issue of the Annual Review of Banking Law (now the Review of Banking & Financial Law) was published. Although the graduate program came to dominate the center’s activities, the current financial crisis has returned the center to its original mission, which we see as threefold: education, research and publication, and outreach.

Here are just a few examples of how we are fulfilling that mission:

On April 23, 2009, the Center, along with the Group of Thirty and the Bretton Woods Committee, sponsored a Washington, D.C., symposium called “Shaping Global Financial Reform” to address the architectural reforms that await the nation’s and the world’s financial system. The symposium included such thought leaders as Paul Volcker (Chair of the Economic Recovery Advisory Board), Sheila Bair (Chair, FDIC), Sir Anthony Crockett, John Dugan (Comptroller of the Currency), and many others. BU President Robert Brown welcomed a distinguished audience to this timely event; these proceedings may be seen in the spring issue of the Review of Banking & Financial Law.
Since January 2009, we have been conducting noontime seminars in downtown Boston to educate the bar and the business community about the rapid-fire events surrounding the crisis. Co-sponsored with the Boston Bar Association, these programs, called The Buck Starts Here, have three components: first, an update on Washington developments; second, a drill-down on an important issues of the day, such as TARP or securitizations; and, third, a presentation by a CEO about how his or her company is coping with the new economic realities. These programs have been well attended and well received and can be seen on the Morin Center’s website at http://www.bu.edu/morincenter.
The center’s director serves as the rapporteur to the American Bar Association’s Task Force on Financial Markets Regulatory Reform. This responsibility places the center in the midst of the ongoing debate over the shape of the financial services industry to come.
Recent speakers, as part of the Edward Lane-Reticker Speaker Series, include Congressman Barney Frank and Mr. Marshall N. Carter, chair of NYSE Group and past-CEO of State Street Corporation. Congressman Michael Capuano recently addressed the annual banquet of the Review of Banking & Financial Law.
Our graduates and students are every bit a part of the solution. Assisted by center subsidies, our top graduates have the opportunity to become Morin Center Development Fellows and work in developing countries to improve their financial infrastructures. Our current students serve as volunteers helping homeowners in the Boston area avoid foreclosure. In this regard, one of our graduates, Carolina Trujillo (’01), was recently honored with BU Law’s Young Lawyer’s Chair at the Silver Shingle Awards Dinner for her work as homeownership programs director for the Neighborhood of Affordable Housing. Carolina is the first LLM graduate ever to earn this coveted distinction.
Joining us at the center as Senior Fellows are Messrs. Robert Bench and Donald Terry. Bob brings to us a career in financial services which commenced when he signed on as a national bank examiner right after his graduation from BU in 1965. At the OCC, he rose to be deputy comptroller before leaving to head up the global bank regulatory practice of PricewaterhouseCoopers in Washington, D.C. Bob helps us dimension the center and adds a valuable perspective as we carry out part of our mission to help explain the ongoing crisis to various constituencies. Don was the Manager of the Multilateral Investment Fund of the Inter-American Development Bank since the MIF’s inception in 1993. Before joining the MIF, Terry held a number of senior staff positions in the United States Congress and the United States Treasury Department. Don currently teaches the Morin Center’s course on Microfinance and Development and is a leading authority on payment systems. Together, Bob and Don help the center formulate the Morin Center’s point of view on issues surrounding the financial services industry.
In Fall 2010, the center will strengthen its line-up of Basics series that it offers with the American Bar Association through the introduction of Consumer Financial Services Basics, a one-and-a-half-day primer on the rules and regulations in the expanding field of consumer financial law. Other programs in the Basics series include Banking Law Basics, Investment Company Basics, and Financial Services Basics. The latter is offered primarily every fall to students entering the graduate program and is intended to give lawyers and students a basic grounding in the world of financial services.

As the financial system is redesigned, you can expect the Morin Center to be participating in the debate and offering practical and well-thought-of solutions. If that means being out of step, so be it. As we’ve shown before, we certainly don’t mind being ahead of the pack.

Program Information

Courses and Concentrations

The LLM in Banking & Financial Law degree requires the successful completion of ten courses consisting mostly of electives; however, you must take the Banking Structure and Regulation course. If your law degree is from a non-U.S. law school, you are encouraged—but not required—to take Introduction to the American Legal System. You may take up to two of your ten courses from outside the program’s curriculum provided that the director approves the elective courses. Courses may be chosen from BU Law’s JD curriculum or Graduate Tax Program or from the School of Management’s graduate curriculum.

If you do not have previous accounting education or experience, you are urged to take Accounting for Financial Institutions. If you have a non-U.S. law degree, you may need to take other courses if you wish to qualify for American bar examinations, the requirements for which vary from state to state. An academic advisor will work closely with you to help you select courses that meet your individual interests and requirements.

Concentrations have been designed to make the program intellectually challenging and professionally rewarding. They are structured to give students a thorough grounding in the area of interest in which they wish to specialize.

A highlight among the concentrations is Financial Services Transactions, a unique concentration that allows the student to pursue an internship during the LLM year. The perfect synergy of theory and practice, it gives students real-world feedback to the strategies and principles of deal-making learned in the classroom.

Concentration Choices

With more than 25 courses to choose from, students sometimes face difficult choices when selecting courses that would be most intellectually or professionally appealing.

To help focus your studies, the program offers several optional concentrations from which you may choose:

American Banking & Financial Law—a full range of financial law courses designed for students who intend to practice law or work in the United States financial services industry;
Compliance Management—focused on designing a compliance system for financial and commercial institutions in a regulatory environment that seeks to avoid the scandals, mismanagement and fraud that shook the industry in recent years;
Financial Services Transactions—for lawyers seeking to gain experience in conducting complex financial services transactions by complementing theory with a working knowledge of the practical aspects of structuring and executing a deal through in-class negotiation sessions and an internship. Students in this concentration are required to complete the Financial Services Law Internship;
International Banking & Financial Law—intended to meet the needs of lawyers from abroad who must work in a banking and financial services market increasingly global in scope;
Lending & Credit Transactions—geared for lawyers who wish to specialize in debt financing, including issues involving the constitution of security over property, foreclosure and bankruptcy; and
Securities Transactions—designed for those interested in matters involving equity and debt securities and the management of funds, including the obligations of issuers, their directors and officers as well as fund managers and agents, brokers and dealers.

You may pursue a maximum of two concentrations, which are recorded on your transcript. A concentration requires that you take at least four of the courses listed for that concentration