Eric Halperin, a longtime consumer advocate, fair lending litigator and civil rights official at the Justice Department in the Obama administration, has been named enforcement chief at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, sources said.
Halperin is the first big hire by CFPB Director Rohit Chopra, who is starting to fill out top management roles since taking over the agency on Oct. 12. Chopra still has several high-level vacancies to fill, including general counsel and associate director of supervision, enforcement and fair lending.
The news was first reported by Bloomberg Law.
Halperin had been CEO of Civil Rights Corps, a Washington nonprofit focused on injustice in the U.S. legal system. Before that he was a senior advisor at the Open Society Foundations, a grantmaking network founded by the hedge fund billionaire George Soros. He served two stints at the Justice Department over nearly 10 years. He served as acting deputy assistant attorney general and as a special counsel for fair lending in the Obama administration from 2010 to 2014.
Before that, Halperin spent six years at the Center for Responsible Lending as director of litigation. He also taught civil rights law and policy for a year at Stanford University. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1998, Halperin spent five years as a trial attorney in the Justice Department’s civil rights division.
Halperin succeeds Cara Petersen, who served for more than two years as the CFPB’s acting director for enforcement.
In addition, Seth Frotman will serve as an advisor to Chopra, Bloomberg Law reported. Frotman has been executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center and is a former CFPB student loan ombudsman.
