James M Landis - scholar, administrator, advocate, and political advisor - is known for his seminal contribution to the creation of the modern system of market regulation in the USA.
As a highly influential participant in the politics of the New Deal he drafted the statute which was to become the foundation for Securities Regulation in the US, and by extension the founding principle of financial market regulation across the world. He was also a complex and in some ways tragic figure, whose glittering career collapsed following the revelation that he had failed to pay tax for a five year period in the 1950's.
This candid and revealing book sets his life and achievements in the context of his work as an academic, legislative draughtsman, Dean and administrator, and explains for the first time how and why, shortly before his early death, Landis abandoned his theory of market regulation in favour of a model which finds loud echoes in the aftermath of the world's recent financial crises.