Produced by the Tulane Law School Usable Past Project
SITE CREDITS
Matthew Miller, Software Developer Benjamin C. Varadi, Research Fellow Justin Levy, Chief Legal Engineer Evan Dicharry, Senior Research Coodinator W. Ron Gard, Applied Cultural Theorist Durationator Copyright Friends Others that Help US
Since 2004, she has also been a Non-Resident Fellow of the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society. Her recent publications on these topics have been published in the Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal, the Journal of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A., Santa Clara High Tech and Computer Law Journal, and the Journal for Internet Law. She was also a guest blogger at Terra Nova, and for the three years blogged at http://academiccopyright.typepad.com, examining copyright issues in an academic setting. Her Tulane Law School blog made its debut in July 2007.
During (and just after) law school, she served as a clerk for David Gantz on a number of NAFTA arbitration cases, including the Chapter 20 cross-border trucking case between Mexico and the US, and she also directed a two-year multimedia project, "Preparing for Lives in the Law," with Dean Toni Massaro at Arizona.
Her doctoral dissertation examined the cultural expression of war in art, literature, memoir, film, drama, and other forms, with a focus on the First World War, and asked the question: what defines identity and membership within a war generation? She is currently in the process of turning this project into a book entitled The Making of a War Generation. While enrolled as a student at UCLA, she also worked as a professional actor in film and television.
Professor Townsend-Gard's teaching and research areas include Intellectual Property (IP survey, copyright, trademark, and international intellectual property), International Law (trade, NAFTA, globalization, ADR, trade and IP), Legal History and Theory, Comparative Law, and Property.
Matt Miller has assisted with the Usable Past Project since July of 2007, and he has developed the software that runs the system. He has also translated laws and flow charts researched by others and turned them into a set of logical statements that (basically) create a directed acyclic graph representing a finite state automaton. Matt is proud that the software is a general purpose tool, even though the representation language is not Turing Complete. This means that the same software could theoretically be used to power anything where the questions and answers can be represented by a directed acyclic graph (which is probably a lot of problems).
Matt respects combinatorics, and wonders what mathematical function describes the growth of this system. Regardless, N has become large.
Matt graduated from Tulane Law School in 2009, and now works as an attorney for Carver, Darden, Koretzky, Tessier, Finn, Blossman and Areaux, LLC in New Orleans.
Prior to attending law school, Matt worked as a software engineer in New Orleans for almost five years, developing patent-pending video surveillence software and working with various web technologies. Prior to that, he attended Duke University, graduating with double majors in Computer Science and Psychology.
Matt is married with a daughter and three pugs.
Ben first arrived in New Orleans shortly after Hurricane Katrina, and before law school served as fulltime volunteer Technology Coordinator for grassroots relief NGO Common Ground, and as Local Technology Coordinator for TechNOLA- a Microsoft-funded hurricane recovery project jointly administered by the Louisiana Association of Nonprofit Organizations and national IT nonprofit NPower. Previously, Ben worked as a freelance social technology advisor to enterprise and nonprofit entities across the country.
Ben received his J.D. in 2009 J.D. from Tulane University Law School, and is actively (and unapologetically!) seeking post-graduation employment. His resume and contact info can be found here.
In his (largely hypothetical) free time, he enjoys backcountry hiking, plays the violin, studies JKA Shotokan Karate, and is restoring a 1978 Ford F-150.
Justin Levy has assisted with the Usable Past Project since January of 2008. He has been involved in proofing the paths that lead to the proper copyright duration and has written explanations to help the User determine the correct answer to each query.
Justin is currently a third year law student at Tulane University. In addition to working with the Usable Past Project, he is interning with the New Orleans BioInnovation Center, an organization that is seeking to grow a biotech industry in Louisiana. There, he conducts market analyses, drafts provisional patents, and advises scientists. He has interned with Entergy where he did legal research on trademark infringement, casualty litigation, the right of appeal, and how to plan a construction project of a nuclear facility regulated by the Louisiana Public Service Commission. Furthermore, he has volunteered with the Pro Bono Project where he connected attorneys with indigent clients in need of legal assistance, and assisted indigent clients with paperwork for administrative agencies.
Prior to attending law school, he received his undergraduate degree in Biomedical Engineering at Boston University and worked in Cognitive Science and Molecular Biology labs.