Cathy Lesser Mansfield, JD

Cathy Lesser Mansfield joined the Case Western Reserve Law School faculty in July 2019. Prior to joining the CWRU faculty she was a Professor of Law at Drake University Law School, served as a Policy Analyst with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and was a Visiting Professor of Law at Georgetown Law School. 

Mansfield teaches a variety of consumer, payments, and commercial law courses. She has served as a consultant to the National Consumer Law Center, and is a co-author of the National Consumer Law Center’s Consumer Banking and Payments Law manual. She served as the Chair of the Board of Directors for Americans for Fairness in Lending, a non-profit organization working towards re-regulation of the consumer financial services industry, and she is a frequent lecturer on consumer protection issues.

She also teaches a course called “Holocaust and the Law,” which she developed after serving as a Silberman Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. She is a Distinguished Fellow at The Consortium for the Research and Study of Holocaust and the Law at Chicago-Kent College of Law’s Center for National Security and Human Rights Law, and is currently working on a book on the topic. 

Mansfield is the composer and librettist of an opera, entitled The Sparks Fly Upward, that follows three German families in Berlin, two Jewish and one Christian, through the Holocaust, and she is founder and Executive Director of The Sparks Fly Upward Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to educating people about the Holocaust, genocide and tolerance through presentations of Sparks, and ancillary activities. 

View CV.