Federalization of Insurance: Federal Insurance Office

Associate Dean Thomas joined the UMKC Law Faculty in 1993. His research focuses on insurance law and on the intersection between law and culture. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the New Appleman on Insurance Law Library Edition, co-author of the three-volume treatise Uninsured and Underinsured Motorist Insurance, and an Adviser to the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law, Liability Insurance. His work on law and culture includes Rule of Law with Chinese Characteristics: An Empirical Cultural Perspective on China, Hong Kong and Singapore, 22 Asia Pacific Law Review 115 (2014), Cultural Imaginary, the Rule of Law and (Post-) Colonialism in Indonesia: Perspectives from Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s “This Earth of Mankind,” and The Law an Harry Potter (Carolina Academic Press, J. Thomas and F. Snyder, eds., 2010). His student comment, Statement of Fact, Statements of Opinion, and the First Amendment, 74 California Law Review 1001 (1986), has been cited by the United States Supreme Court.

Dean Thomas attended the BerkeleyLaw of the University of California, Berkeley, where he was an executive editor on the California Law Review. As an undergraduate, Dean Thomas studied political science at Loyola Marymount University, but spent much of his time engaged in competitive intercollegiate debate. He and his partner, Doug Cotton, were ranked in the top ten debate teams in the country by the National Debate Tournament at-large bidding process for his junior and senior years of college.

Before joining the faculty, Thomas was a Bigelow Teaching Fellow and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School. He also spent five years practicing law in Southern California with the law firm Irell and Manella, working on civil litigation and insurance coverage matters. Prior to practicing law, he was a law clerk to the Honorable M. Joseph Blumenfeld of the United State District Court, District of Connecticut.

He teaches Torts, Civil Procedure and Introduction to American Law and Culture. He has been a visiting professor at University of Connecticut, Nankai University in Tianjin, China (as a Fulbright Fellow), and Immanuel Kant State University inn Kaliningrad, Russia (also as a Fulbright Fellow), and an adjunct professor at Loyola Law School (Los Angeles). As Associate Dean, he has responsibility for oversight of international programs, including study abroad and the LL.M. in Lawyering. In his free time, Dean Thomas enjoys travel, books, popular culture, and chocolate. He is an amateur chocolatier.

Peter Kochenburger is the Executive Director of the Insurance Law LL.M. Program, Deputy Director of the Insurance Law Center and Associate Clinical Professor of Law at UConn Law School. He directs the Insurance Law LL.M. program and teaches courses in insurance law and regulation. Professor Kochenburger has developed and taught the first online courses at the School of Law, including Liability Insurance and Comparative Insurance Regulation, which involves students and faculty from China, Italy and the United States. He was elected to the American Law Institute in 2013 and was a member of the Consultative Group for the Restatement of Liability Insurance project. He has published in the areas of consumer protection, Big Data and insurance regulation, liability insurance and gun ownership, and climate change and insurance.

Professor Kochenburger has served as a Funded Consumer Representative to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners since 2010 and was appointed to the Treasury Department’s Federal Advisory Committee on Insurance in 2020. He helped create the first consumer representative program with the International Association of Insurance Supervisors, in which he also participates as a consumer stakeholder. Professor Kochenburger has spoken at numerous insurance law programs in the U.S. and internationally, focusing on insurance regulation, law and consumer protection, and organized and taught training sessions for state insurance regulators, industry professional groups, and regulators from multiple countries, including China. He consults with policyholders, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations on insurance and consumer issues, and serves as an expert witness in insurance-related lawsuits. Professor Kochenburger has been appointed to the Connecticut Insurance Department’s Advisory Council on Regulation and selected as a member of the New York Department of Financial Services’ Consumer Protection Task Force, which began working in January 2020.

Before joining the faculty, Professor Kochenburger was Counsel at Travelers Property Casualty for 11 years, managing significant coverage and bad faith litigation, as well as legislative and regulatory affairs. Professor Kochenburger also served as an Assistant Attorney General in the Consumer Protection Division of Iowa's Department of Justice, where he enforced state and federal consumer credit laws and led litigation nationwide against several of the country’s largest financial services companies. From 1986-88 he served as Special Assistant to the Dean of Harvard Law School.

Professor Kochenburger graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School and holds his B.A. cum laude in history from Yale University.

Francine L. Semaya is currently a legal consultant in insurance regulation, reinsurance, insurance insolvency and transactional matters. She was previously the chair of the insurance regulatory and transactional group of two international law firms, where she handled corporate and regulatory filings, and counseled clients with respect to compliance with insurance regulatory requirements, as well as reinsurance and insolvency matters. She concentrates her practice in reinsurance, insolvency and national and global insurance regulatory matters in the areas of property, casualty, life, annuity, surety and financial guaranty. In addition to handling insurance regulatory, insolvency and transactional matters, she performs legal and compliance audits and serves as an expert witness. Ms. Semaya was named a “2009 Woman to Watch” by Business Insurance magazine.

Active in several professional organizations, Ms. Semaya is a past President of the International Association of Insurance Receivers, having previously served as a member of its Board of Directors. She is a longtime member of the American Bar Association’s Tort Trial and Insurance Practice Section (TIPS), where she has assumed various leadership roles including six years as the section’s Delegate to the House of Delegates and three years on TIPS Council. She served as the founding Chair and then Chaired the TIPS Task Force on Federal Involvement in Insurance Regulation Modernization and Health Care Reform from its inception in 2004 through August 2014; past Chair of the Task Force on Implementation of TIPS Insurance Insolvency Report; a member of the Excess Surplus Lines and Reinsurance Committee and a member and past Chair of TIPS Insurance Regulation Committee. Ms. Semaya is on the Board of Directors of Insurance Federation of New York. She is also a member of the New York City Bar’s Insurance Law Committee; past member of the Practising Law Institute’s Insurance Law Advisory Board and AIDA. As a member of Federation of Regulatory Counsel, she served for several years on its Admissions Committee.

Ms. Semaya is a frequent lecturer and has authored numerous articles in both legal and insurance trade publications, including National Underwriter Property & Casualty, Best’s Review, American Bar Association, Practising Law Institute and others on topics pertaining to insurance regulatory, reinsurance and insolvency law. She is often called upon to organize and chair seminars and programs of significance to the insurance industry. Ms. Semaya is Co-Author of Insurance Law for Common Interest Communities: Condominiums, Cooperatives and Homeowner Associations, published by Sunshine Gardens Legal Publishers, LLC, 2018 and The Law of Flood Insurance – North Carolina Edition, Sunshine Gardens Legal Publishers, LLC, 2018.