Saule Omarova headshot

Saule Omarova

Senior Fellow

As a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, Saule Omarova researches the institutional, financial, and governance aspects of industrial policy, which includes exploring how public investment tools can be used to structure markets and shape industry dynamics in the public interest.


Saule Omarova is the Beth and Marc Goldberg professor of law and director of the Jack Clarke Program on the Law and Regulation of Financial Institutions and Markets at Cornell Law School. A political scientist and lawyer, she specializes in regulation of financial institutions and markets, banking law, and political economy of finance. Before joining Cornell Law School in 2014, she was the George R. Ward Associate Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law.

Prior to joining academia, Saule Omarova practiced law in the Financial Institutions Group of Davis Polk & Wardwell, a premier New York law firm, where she specialized in a wide variety of corporate transactions and advisory work in the area of financial regulation. From 2006–2007, she served at the US Department of the Treasury as a Special Advisor for Regulatory Policy to the Under Secretary for Domestic Finance.

Saule is a frequent commentator on financial and regulatory matters, including in the New York Times, Financial Times, Bloomberg, Reuters, Rolling Stone, National Public Radio, and the American Prospect. She has testified on a broad range of law and policy issues before the US Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs; the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs; and the US House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services.

She holds a PhD in political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Juris Doctor degree from Northwestern University School of Law. Her academic and policy publications include “The People’s Ledger: How to Democratize Money and Finance the Economy” (2021), The Climate Case for a National Investment Authority (2020), “A National Investment Authority: Financing America’s Future” (2020), “What Kind of Finance Should There Be?”(2020), and “Public Actors in Private Markets: Toward a Developmental Finance State” (with Robert C. Hockett) (2015). Her doctoral dissertation was on “The Political Economy of Oil in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan” (University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1999).