Christopher L. Peterson
Chris Peterson, Of Counsel to Gupta Wessler LLP, is the John J. Flynn Endowed Professor of Law at the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law. Chris is a recognized national authority on the law of consumer finance and has been actively engaged in public service and consumer protection in a wide range of roles. He works with the firm to develop ground-up cases and lends his expertise on a variety of litigation projects. He has previously served as an expert witness in consumer-protection litigation on behalf of the states of Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and the U.S. Department of Justice.
From 2012 to 2016, Chris served as Special Advisor to Director Richard Cordray at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; as Senior Counsel for Enforcement Policy and Strategy at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; and as Special Advisor at the Pentagon, where he focused on protecting military servicemembers from predatory lending through implementation of the Military Lending Act. From 2018 to 2020 he was the Director of Financial Services for the Consumer Federation of America. And, in 2020 he was the Democratic Party’s nominee for Governor of Utah. Supported by a broad coalition of organized labor, civil rights, and public interest organizations, he won more votes than any Democratic Party gubernatorial candidate in Utah history. From 2009 to 2012, Chris served as his law school’s Academic Dean.
Chris has frequently testified in congressional hearings and has presented his research to the FDIC, the Fed, and the White House in both Democratic and Republican administrations. His books include the casebook Consumer Law: Cases and Materials and Taming the Sharks: Towards a Cure for the High Cost Credit Market, which won the American College of Consumer Financial Services Lawyers’ outstanding book of the year prize. He is a consumer fellow of the American Bar Association’s Consumer Financial Services Committee and a Regent of the American College of Consumer Financial Services Lawyers.
Chris is a recipient of the National Association of Consumer Agency Administrators’ Consumer Advocate of the Year award and the Pentagon’s Secretary of Defense Award for Excellence–both bestowed in recognition of his efforts to protect military servicemembers from predatory lending. Before joining the Utah law faculty in 2008, Chris taught for five years at the University of Florida’s College of Law. He also worked as a consumer rights attorney for U.S. Public Interest Research Group in Washington, D.C., and clerked for Judge Wade Brorby on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
