Mercer E. Bullard is the founder and president of Fund
Democracy, a nonprofit advocacy group for mutual fund shareholders;
a Jessie D. Puckett, Jr., Lecturer and Associate Professor of Law
at the University of Mississippi School of Law; and a Vice
President with Plancorp LLC, a fee-only financial planning firm. He
teaches in the areas of securities and banking regulation,
corporate finance, corporations, contracts, and law and economics.
Through Fund Democracy, Professor Bullard has submitted comment
letters, organized rule-making petition drives, litigated issues,
requested hearings on exemptions, drafted and edited legislation,
and testified before House, Senate and Department of Labor
committees on mutual funds, 529 plans, 401(k) plans and other
regulatory issues.
Professor Bullard was a member of the SEC’s inaugural Investor
Advisory Committee, for which he chaired the Investor as Purchaser
Subcommittee, and serves as a member of the CFP Board of Standards’
Public Policy Council. Professor Bullard was named by Investment
News in March 2001 as one of the 25 most powerful voices in the
financial services industry and in December 2009 as one of the
nation’s 20 top influencers in the financial services industry. He
is a former Assistant Chief Counsel in the SEC's Division of
Investment Management, former attorney in the corporate/securities
practice of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, and former law clerk
for the Honorable Will Garwood, U.S. Court of Appeals, Fifth
Circuit. He has a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of
Law, where he was an Articles Editor of the Virginia Law
Review and joined the Order of the Coif. He also received an
M.A. from Georgetown University and a B.A. from Yale
University.