Michael Barr (Treasury official)

Michael S. Barr is the Roy F. and Jean Humphrey Proffitt Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School and Professor of Public Policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. Previously he served as Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions of the U.S. Treasury Department, where he helped to develop and pass the Dodd–Frank Act.

Barr received degrees from Yale College, where he graduated summa cum laude with honors in history in 1987, Magdalen College, Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar and earned an M.Phil. in international affairs in 1989, and Yale Law School, from which he graduated in 1992. He later served as a clerk for United States Supreme Court Justice David Souter and worked for the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department before first working for the U.S. Treasury Department and advising the White House during the Clinton administration. He returned to Treasury during the first two years of the Barack Obama administration, after which he returned to his teaching post at Michigan.

He is a non-resident scholar at the Brookings Institution and serves as an advisor to the Clinton Global Initiative. He has served as a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.