by SCOTT FERGUSON & WILLIAM SAAS
We speak with Vijay Raghavan, Professor of Law at the Brooklyn Law School, about his recent article, “The Radical Potential of Consumer Financial Protection,” published in Boston College Law Review in April 2025. Raghavan builds on the work of constitutional money theorists, as well as his legal experience in the public sector. In particular, he argues that consumer financial protection is an essential and potentially radical response to the “finance franchise,” a predominantly anti-democratic process by which modern governments delegate the money creation process to private actors like banks. The consensus in contemporary left sociological and legal scholarship dismisses consumer financial protection as a rearguard effort to sustain neoliberal capitalism. Raghavan, by contrast, reconceptualizes consumer financial protection as a vital counterweight to legally structured domination in financial markets. By tracing the history of this struggle from the early 20th century to the present, Raghavan provides a powerful legal framework for today’s debtor movements, including the national campaigns to cancel student and medical debt. In doing so, Raghavan offers a forward-looking vision for how to build a durable consumer financial protection regime capable of reclaiming democratic authority in the post-Trump era.
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Transcript
This transcript has been edited for readability.
William Saas
Vijay Raghavan, welcome to Money on the Left.
Vijay Raghavan
Thanks for having me.
William Saas
Just to get us started, could you tell us a little bit about your professional and personal background and how it ties in with your fabulous work that we’re going to be talking about on the consumer financial protection regime?
Vijay Raghavan
Yeah, sure. I’m happy to go as in-depth as you want me to, but I’m a lawyer by training. Although my license is no longer active, I graduated from law school in 2007.
My early career was pretty conventional. I went to a big law firm to make money. I think I went to law school with some aspirations to do good, like, in a broad sense, but I ended up at a big law firm doing tax work. It was just as terrible as people say that kind of work is. I worked for really mean people for really long hours. I made what at the time seemed like a lot of money, but I didn’t really understand the work that I was doing. That might feel a little uncharitable. It’s funny, after I became an academic, I ended up contacting one of the former partners I used to work for who’s now in New York in a different firm, and he sort of copped to being a jerk when he was my boss and apologized for it.
I was like, it’s been a decade. If I wanted to place my students there, I thought it was a good professional connection to rebuild or rehabilitate. It wasn’t hard to rehabilitate. He was like, “I’m so sorry. I probably chased you away.” Which, it’s all true.
I was a tax associate at a big law firm. I guess the work was kind of intellectually stimulating, but I really didn’t understand what I was doing. I was definitely working on the tax aspects of transactions that were kind of adjacent to things that caused the world to collapse.
In 2008, when Obama got elected, I — like other people — was really hopeful. I mean, his presidency was pretty disappointing, at least for the kind of work that I do, but at the time I was pretty hopeful. I wanted to be broadly involved in doing something good. The financial crisis was in full effect at that point.
I think it started as early as April of 2006, but the world found out about it in September of 2008. I think those two things kind of pushed me to leave the firm, plus I didn’t like the work that I was doing. As someone who was a tax associated big law firm, trying to make the switch to something public oriented was a little bit hard.
It’s hard to convince people that you have the skills or the desire to do anything. There were lots of people who were similarly situated who were not happy with the work that they were doing, saw something happening, wanted to do more, but didn’t really have a good case to make. I ended up getting this two-year fellowship at a legal aid organization in northern and central Illinois. It was called Prairie State Legal Services. It serves suburban, exurban and rural Illinois outside of Chicago. I was doing tax base legal aid work, mostly representing people who had tax debts to the IRS and then some people who were losing their home to property tax foreclosures.
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