Following on from his critically acclaimed publication 'Blockchain Democracy: Technology, Law and the Rule of the Crowd,' Texas A&M Law School associate professor, William Magnuson, will present his latest book that examines how corporate innovation has shaped society, from ancient Rome to Silicon Valley.
Magnuson states that Americans have long been skeptical of corporations and that skepticism has only grown more intense in recent years. Meanwhile, corporations continue to amass wealth and power at a dizzying rate, recklessly pursuing profit while leaving society to sort out the costs. In For Profit, law professor William Magnuson argues that the story of the corporation didn’t have to come to this. Throughout history, he finds, corporations have been purpose-built to benefit the societies that surrounded them. Corporations enabled everything from the construction of ancient Rome’s roads and aqueducts to the artistic flourishing of the Renaissance to the rise of the middle class in the twentieth century. By recapturing this original spirit of civic virtue, Magnuson argues, corporations can help craft a society in which all of us—not just shareholders—benefit from the profits of enterprise.
Biography
William Magnuson is an associate professor at Texas A&M Law School. Previously he taught law at Harvard, worked as an associate at Sullivan & Cromwell, and as a journalist in the Rome bureau of the Washington Post. He is the author of Blockchain Democracy: Technology, Law and the Rule of the Crowd and has written for numerous leading publications, including Harvard Business Law Review, Stanford Journal of Law, Business and Finance, and the Wall Street Journal.
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