William K. Black has joined the Santa Clara University School of Law as Distinguished Researcher in Residence. He will research contemporary issues concerning insurance fraud and regulatory responses to fraud and will be primarily associated with the law school’s Center for Insurance Law and Policy.
Black will bring a distinctly cross-disciplinary focus to Santa Clara University. In addition to his duties at the School of Law, Black will be a scholar in residence at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics working on corporate and regulatory governance, ethical leadership and anti-corruption efforts. He will teach classes in the Leavey School of Business’ MBA program on the Social, Political and Legal environment of business.
Black also is the Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention (IFP). IFP’s mission is to fund and conduct research and provide expert advice to help develop best practices to fight fraud and corruption.
Professor Black has taught at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, as a Regents’ Lecturer at the University of California at Irvine, as a distinguished scholar in residence at Claremont McKenna. He received his A.B. in economics and a JD from the University of Michigan and a Ph. D. in Criminology, Law and Society from the University of California at Irvine. He has an international reputation in the fields of anti-fraud, anti-corruption, corporate governance and effective and ethical regulatory leadership.
He has recently authored The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, which describes the concept of “control fraud,” by which a CEO or heads of state use the resources and power of the corporation or nation to defraud customers, creditors, investors and citizens. George Akerlof, a Nobel Laureate in Economics, has called the book “a classic” and Robert Kuttner praised it in his September 10, 2005 Business Week column as “partly the definitive history of the savings-and-loan industry scandals…. More important, it is a general theory of how dishonest CEOs … can systematically defeat market discipline [and] create massive damage.”
