CNN reports:

Long before Elizabeth Warren became one of the nation’s leading progressive voices, she was an academic who articulated a conservative worldview on the economy.

As a law professor in the 1980s and 1990s, Warren criticized the overabundance of government regulations, calling them “a tax,” and spoke to conservative legal groups like the Federalist Society and the Manhattan Institute, a CNN KFile review of Warren’s academic research, interviews and speeches in this period found.

The material, including Warren’s previously unreported comments on regulations and her association with conservative groups, sheds new light on the early part of her career, before she became actively involved in politics.

Warren rarely discusses her evolution from a “moderate conservative,” as one former colleague described her to CNN, to a leading Democratic presidential candidate proposing ambitious liberal policies. She has said previously that as she established herself as one of the nation’s leading experts in bankruptcy, she came to realize through her research the need for aggressive regulation of the financial industry.

Warren changed her party registration from Republican to Democrat in 1996. Asked about the shift in 2014, she told ABC News that she realized the Republican Party “really stood up for the big financial institutions when the big financial institutions are just hammering middle class American families.” [Continue reading…]