Morgan Ricks has joined Vanderbilt’s law faculty as an assistant professor. Ricks’ teaching and scholarship focus on financial regulation.
Ricks joins Vanderbilt from Harvard Law School, where he was a visiting assistant professor from 2010-12.
Hired in 2009 as the second member of the Treasury Department’s financial crisis management team, Ricks served the Obama administration as a senior policy advisor and financial restructuring expert in the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Capital Markets until 2010.
Before joining the Treasury Department, Ricks served from 2008-09 as a risk-arbitrage trader at Citadel Investment Group, a Chicago-based hedge fund. He had previously served from 2005-07 as a vice president in the investment banking division of Merrill Lynch & Co., where he specialized in strategic and capital-raising transactions for financial services companies. He began his career at Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz, where he worked as a mergers and acquisitions attorney from 2001-04.
He holds a J.D. (magna cum laude) from Harvard Law School and earned his undergraduate degree in history summa cum laude from Dartmouth College, where he was the winner of the Charles Downer Hazen Fellowship Award. His scholarly publications include “The Case for Regulating the Shadow Banking System,” which will appear in the forthcoming book Too Big to Fail? Resolving Large Trouble Financial Institutions in the Future (Brookings Institution Press); “Money and (Shadow) Banking: A Thought Experiment,” forthcoming in the Review of Banking and Financial Law, and “Regulating Money Creation After the Crisis (1 Harvard Business Law Review, 2011). He is also the author of “A Former Treasury Adviser on How to Really Fix Wall Street,” which appeared in the December 17, 2011, edition of The New Republic.
“I am particularly delighted that Morgan is joining our faculty,” said Randall Thomas, professor of law and director of Vanderbilt’s Law & Business Program. “He brings a wealth of experience in the regulation of financial markets from his work with the Treasury Department and in the legal academy. His knowledge and skills will be an asset to the Law and Business Program.”
At Vanderbilt, Ricks will teach Regulation of Financial Institutions and a seminar, Regulating Financial Stability.