Computer Programming for Lawyers at Georgetown Law is headed by Professor Paul Ohm.
Running this course requires a small army of people. This page will list everybody who has helped create or maintain the course and will serve as an archive of personnel from the past.
Jonathan Frankle: My true partner in crime, Jonathan created the course with me and co-taught it the first time it was offered, in Spring 2016. The next year, he wrote the textbook we now use for the class (my name on the cover does not represent 50% of the labor!) Even though he is working toward a Ph.D at MIT, he has given up his free time to continue to be our “Ben Kenobi’s Ghost”, participating in most of our planning sessions, despite the numerous other demands on his time.
Jonathan and I owe special thanks to Professor Tanina Rostain, who spurred me to create the course in the first place. Tanina first had the idea for me to teach this course, and without her constant encouragement, we never would have created it as quickly as we did!
Thanks also to the incomparable David Lehr who single-handedly ran every aspect of the course in 2017 and answered every Piazza question before the rest of us could get to it!
Thanks to Alan deLevie, who has been my co-instructor for since Spring 2017, and who helped spur the great “API Awakening” of the course.
The Georgetown Law administration has been supportive of this course from the outset. You cannot create this course without a creative and flexible Dean’s office, willing to work with you to make the odd features of the course fit within a law school framework not meant for this kind of course. Most importantly, Dean Bill Treanor has always been the course’s biggest cheerleader, and he has made sure that everybody in his administration gives it all the support it needs. Associate Dean Naomi Mezey and Assistant Dean Sally McCarthy helped me earn course approvals with ridiculous speed and minimal fuss, and Vice Dean Jane Aiken and Associate Deans Josh Teitelbaum and Julie O’Sullivan help me hire and pay TAs. Dominique Brown makes sure we always have the many classrooms we need, and George Pestasis and his entire IT staff deal with our unreasonable technology requests. Dean of Students, Mitch Bailin, brought student complaints and anxieties over the course to me with his usual world-class levels of professionalism, discretion, and wise counsel. Finally, the entire Registrar’s office staff, most important Louis Fine, ensure that our long waiting lists and odd prerequisites and drop rules, are just background noise for us.
Thank you to Michael Daniels for setting up this website.
Merci beaucoup to my benefactors at the AXA Research Fund, who understood how my efforts to advance legal education around computer programming fit well within our joint work on “Big Data, Privacy, and Discrimination”. I simply could not have supported this class without this vital support.
Thanks also to James Grimmelmann of Cornell, who teaches a similar course with some of our materials, and who has become our most incisive and helpful sounding board, even if he doesn’t like Chapter 2 of the book!
Thank you to the nearly 200 students who have taken this course. Your leap of faith to enroll in this odd experiment, as well as the perserverence you showed to survive it, is of course what makes the course possible at all!
Now, to recognize the additional staff from each year of the course:
2016: TA[0], Chris Chamberlain.
2017: The stellar team of TAs, Stephan Dalal, Isvari Mohan, and Ethan Plail.
2018: The Head TA Ethan Plail and the team of TAs, who will be listed soon.