Professor Jerry Comizio Named Associate Director of the Business Law Program
March 3, 2020
American University Washington College of Law (AUWCL) and the Business Law Program congratulate V. Gerard (Jerry) Comizio on his new position as associate director of the Business Law Program.
Comizio is a leading authority on financial services regulatory, transactional, and compliance matters. He has extensive experience in representing a wide range of financial services companies, including both domestic and foreign banking organizations, non-bank financial institutions, fintech companies, digital currency exchanges and private equity firms engaged in covered fund, merchant banking, and so-called 4(c)(6) activities. Comizio has been an adjunct professor of banking law at AUWCL for a number of years, teaching courses on U.S. banking law, international banking law, regulation of financial institutions, and U.S. business associations.
In private practice, he advised some of the nation’s largest financial institutions on the wide range of transactional, regulatory, and compliance issues under federal and state banking laws facing U.S. and foreign banking organizations, including the Dodd-Frank Act, Regulation K, bank chartering, merger and acquisition, stock and debt offerings, enforcement proceedings, complex regulatory and strategic planning, money transmission, BSA/AML, GSE, and residential and commercial loan issues. He has also submitted a number of amicus briefs to the Supreme Court on behalf of national trade groups and financial institutions on complex financial services laws issues.
Comizio joins AUWCL from Fried Frank Shriver Harris and Jacobsen LLP, where he was a partner and chaired their banking practice. Prior to that, he was a partner and chaired the banking practice at Paul Hastings LLP, and was managing partner of the DC Office of Thacher Proffit and Wood LLP. Prior to private practice, Comizio was for many years the deputy general counsel of the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Thrift Supervision and its predecessor, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (currently the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency), and a senior attorney in The Division of Corporation Finance at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. From 1993-1994, Comizio led a U.S. Treasury Department task force related to U.S. Senate and House financial services committee hearings in response to widely publicized abuses in the initial public offering market for bank mutual to stock conversions. This task force was widely credited with initiating comprehensive regulatory reform of this area at the federal and state level.
Comizio has been featured in the American Banker’s annual “Washington Insider’s Survey of the 25 Most Influential People Involved in Financial Services Regulatory Issues.” He also has regularly appeared on television, internet media, and radio discussing current financial services regulatory issues, including Fox Business News, Bloomberg TV, Wall Street Journal Online, Dow Jones Online, C-SPAN, and has been widely quoted on financial services issues in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Financial Times, Reuters, Bloomberg, and other major newspapers and publications. He has been consistently recognized by Chambers, Legal 500 and other major law firm practice rankings.
Comizio has written extensively about current issues in financial services regulation. He is the author of International Banking Law (West Academic 2016), one of the first major casebooks on international banking law issues. He is also the contributing author to three books on financial services issues: Winning Legal Strategies for Banking Law, Aspatore Books (2005); The Bank Investor Relations Handbook, America’s Community Bankers (2003); and The Bank Founder’s Guidebook, SNL Securities (1999).
Comizio is a member of the Governing Committee of the U.S. Conference on Consumer Finance Law and the Board of Advisors of the University of North Carolina Law School Center for Banking and Finance. He is also the former chairman of the Trusts and Investments Subcommittee of the American Bar Association’s Banking Law Committee and the Advisory Board of the George Washington Law School Center for Law Economics and Finance.