Join us for the Austin launch of The Just and the Good: How Law Made the Western World, as William Magnuson traces two thousand years of Western law to shed light on what the law is and what it can be.

About the Event

First Light Books is proud to host the launch celebration for The Just and the Good: How Law Made the Western World by William Magnuson. Magnuson will be in conversation with William Forbath, the Lloyd M. Bentsen Chair in Law at the University of Texas School of Law. Doors open at 6:00 PM, with the conversation beginning at 6:30 PM.

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About the Book

"We humans make our laws, and then our laws make us, William Magnuson explains—informatively, insightfully, elegantly. One of the best books on the history of law I've read in years." —H.W. Brands, author of The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin

As debates rage over the rights and duties of citizens, corporations, presidents, and nations, fundamental questions about the rule of law have taken on renewed urgency. Why is the law worthy of our respect, and what role should it play in shaping a free society? The Just and the Good by William Magnuson traces two thousand years of Western law in order to shed light on what the law is and what it can be.​

In this book, Magnuson examines ten foundational laws and legal institutions that transformed the course of Western history, from the courts of ancient Athens and the legal codes of Rome to the Magna Carta, the U.S. Constitution, and the American civil rights movement. He explores how law has influenced human behavior, structured political life, and both reflected and shaped ideas about freedom, equality, and justice. Through vivid storytelling and careful historical analysis, Magnuson examines both the achievements and failures of legal systems, arguing that law is not merely a product of society but a force that influences how people live, govern, and understand justice.​

Lively and thoroughly researched, The Just and the Good examines the legal ideas and institutions that underpin modern democracy, constitutional government, and individual rights within the Western tradition. Ultimately, this book shows that law is a bet that we can solve our problems together and build a society that is just and good. That by setting wise rules and constraints, we can make ourselves better, freer, more virtuous human beings.

About the Author

William J. Magnuson is a professor at Texas A&M Law School. He was formerly a journalist with the Washington Post and the Associated Press. He is the author of For Profit: A History of Corporations and Blockchain Democracy: Technology, Law, and the Rule of the Crowd.​

About the Conversation Partner

Pramit Chaudhuri (BA Oxford, MA Courtauld, PhD Yale) is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin. He studies Roman epic and tragedy, especially how poets represent struggles over power and belief. His book The War with God: Theomachy in Roman Imperial Poetry (Oxford, 2014) examines the religious and political implications of stories in which mortals confront the gods. His current book project, The Hazards of Peace, asks what room a genre defined by war leaves for debate and diplomacy. With Ralph Anderson, he has also co-edited Belief in Greek and Roman Religion (Cambridge, 2026).​

His work on Italian Renaissance epic, Shakespeare, and Milton examines how writers reinterpret their classical predecessors through imitation and argument. This work shares with his studies of Roman poetry a close attention to wordplay and to the verbal echoes through which writers engage earlier texts. He co-edited Reception and the Classics (Cambridge, 2012) and co-founded the Society for Early Modern Classical Reception.

His attention to poetic language also informs the Quantitative Criticism Lab, which he co-founded and co-directs with Joseph Dexter. The lab brings literary scholars and students together with biologists and data scientists to develop computational methods for criticism. Its research combines statistical analysis of literary style with methods for detecting intertextuality and word- and soundplay. Alongside new interpretations, the lab releases its code and datasets for other researchers. It has concentrated on premodern and multilingual traditions, from Latin and Greek to Old English. The lab's work has appeared in TAPA, Nature Human Behaviour, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the proceedings of computational linguistics conferences including EMNLP and NAACL.

His recent research on artificial intelligence extends this inquiry to literary interpretation itself: how language models arrive at readings, and what makes those readings persuasive. He is a co-author of KRISTEVA, a benchmark for close reading presented at ACL in 2025. Drawing on his teaching of fragmentary Latin literature, he also examines how the uneven survival and study of ancient texts shape the literary histories that models reproduce.

Outside the standard Classics curriculum, he teaches a first-year seminar on the parallel cinema of Bengal. In a Global Virtual Exchange with the University of Macau, students at both institutions worked with the lab's co-directors to develop joint research projects. Exchanges with Queen's University Belfast will extend the model in 2027 and 2028. He also led Black Classicists in Texas, whose 2023 exhibition and website documented the place of Greek and Latin in Black education in central Texas.

He has held a Mellon New Directions Fellowship, and his research has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies.

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