Elizabeth Gard

Elizabeth Townsend Gard is the Director of the Tulane Center for IP, Media & Culture. She specializes in Intellectual Property law, including copyright, trademark, and comparative intellectual property; and entrepreneurship, including social entrepreneurship, solopreneurs, and handcraft-entrepreneurs. She teaches in Tulane's Masters of Jurisprudence in Labor and Employment Law program, where she focuses on the intersection of intellectual property within the context of employment law and business practices across the country.

Townsend Gard's philosophy combines theory and doctrine with immersive practice, both inside and outside of the classroom. For the last decade, she has worked with students to teach skills needed to be successful in both a law practice as well as in the entrepreneurial world for the 21st century. She has co-written a two-volume casebook, "IP: Doctrine and Application in Two Volumes," which reflects her teaching philosophy.

She strongly believes in mentoring students. To that end, she has worked with more than 90 research assistants, and regularly works with students to think through how to make their own road and journey in the legal world. She has started a Tulane Law School podcast, "Legal Journeys" which explores just that: Alumni experiences and advice for those beginning their legal journey. She also has worked with students projects in specialized internships at the Library of Congress, Internet Archive, and the Frick Collection, as well as sending students on research trips to Washington D.C., Paris, New York, Oxford, and Berlin.

Townsend Gard is the founder of the Tulane Center for IP Law and Culture, where the Copyright Research Lab is housed.

Entrepreneurial Experiences

Townsend Gard is the co-inventor and director of the Durationator®, a software system that aims to determine the worldwide copyright status of every kind of cultural work. She also co-owns the Tulane spin-out company, Limited Times, which is commercializing the Durationator® software and services. Students have worked on this project for more than a decade, both on the copyright and entrepreneurial sides, and will continue to do so as it enters its next phase of development. As part of this project, she has developed a database of the Catalog of Copyright Entries (scanned PDFs from the Internet Archive) to assist in searching the copyright records, 1909-1978. The Durationator over the years has expanded its scope to include fair use, classroom uses, library uses, pre-1972 sound recordings, and moral rights.

Townsend Gard is also the host of "Just Wanna Quilt," a research podcast focused on quilting, entrepreneurship and copyright. Launched in 2018, the podcast more than 300 interviews of quilters, industry, scholars, lawyers, and now, with the onset of COVID-19, more than 75 interviews focused on mask making. The podcast has over 25,000 subscribers, and have had over a half a million downloads in its first three years. There is a corresponding Facebook group, Just Wanna Quilt, with over 3000 members, along with sub-groups. As part of this project, Townsend Gard has stated a publishing house, with Ricardo Gonzalez, with seven publications in its first year, including Just Wanna Patent, Just Wanna Create: Copyright and Fair Use Strategies, Just Wanna Trademark, and A Little Bit of Copyright, and Just Wanna Quilt Notebook. Just Wanna Quilt now has a spin-out company, Quilting Army Krewe, which will be opening an Etsy Shop in the Fall 2021 as part of the entrepreneurial experiment, along with the current virtual bookshop.

All of Townsend Gard's courses engage in entrepreneurial activities focused on these projects and more. Other projects in the past include a video game project (that turned into a publication for Routledge), artists and the law project, pre-1972 sound recordings and Hogan Jazz Archive project, Section 512 project, and many more. The goal of the projects is to engage in the act of doing and working with communities that are facing specific legal issues to better understand and train law students.

Townsend Gard has held a number of fellowships associated with entrepreneurship including stints at Idea Village, Propeller, the Lepage Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Tulane, and she was a Social Entrepreneurship Fellow (the Jill H. and Avram A. Glazer Professor of Entrepreneurship) for five years. She has also been granted research awards from Tulane University, technology transfer, and the Provost to support her entrepreneurial work, along with the Paul Verkuil Faculty Research Fund at Tulane Law School.

She also works and assists with running a New Orleans based LGBTQ+ Generation Z arts collective, Eyeridium, which is a blend of original and fan art, crafts, crochet, quilts, and candles.

Her latest endeavor in the Spring 2020 came with the onset of COVID-19, where she began making masks in mid-March, and by April, had co-founded Million Masks a Day, a resource and Facebook group dedicated to providing resources and information to sewists around the country making masks for frontline workers. As part of this endeavor, she personally made more than 800 masks, donating them to a Tulane pediatric immigration clinic, homeless programs, and a Ninth Ward local supermarket. She also was awarded two grants, one from Newcomb Institute and the other from the Taylor Center, to purchase equipment and more than 1000 yards of fabric for 7th Ward sewists working to make masks.

Out of this work came the Homemade Mask Virtual Summit in June 2020, sponsored by the Newcomb Institute, and co-sponsored by the Taylor Center for Innovation and Design Thinking, where scientists and sewists came together over two days to discuss the state and science of homemade masks. This included over 55 panelists and 600 sewists, with the outcome an infographic developed to assist in translating information on mask-making best practices. Townsend Gard was one of the lead authors on the infographic.

Townsend Gard earned a Ph.D. in European History from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a J.D./LL.M. in International Trade from the University of Arizona, specializing in NAFTA, and the intersection off intellectual property and trade law. She served as a clerk on two NAFTA arbitrations for arbitrator David Gantz. She joined the Tulane faculty in 2007. Previously, she taught for one year at Seattle University School of Law as a visiting assistant professor, where she was also a Justice Faculty Fellow at the Center for the Study of Justice in Society. Before that, she taught intellectual property at the London School of Economics, where she held a Leverhulme Trust Research Postdoctoral Fellowship. Since 2004, she has been a non-resident fellow at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society.

Townsend Gard was cited twice by the U.S. Supreme Court in Golan v. Holder (2017) for her work on the Durationator. She has been published in Vanderbilt Law Review, DePaul Law Review, Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal, the Journal of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A., Journal of Internet Law, Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts and Santa Clara Computer & High Technology Law Journal. She has written a chapter for "Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Evolving Economies (Edward Elgar, 2012)" and co-authored a piece with Ron Gard in Modernism and Copyright (Oxford University Press, 2010). She is regularly interviewed by newspapers and other media for her expertise on copyright and entrepreneurship, and now mask making. In 2019-2020, she was the Greenbaum Fellow at Newcomb Institute, to study narrativity and gender in fiber arts. This project, along with another on copyright and time, are her current longterm research projects.

Selected Publications

• The Fizzy Experiment: Second Life, Virtual Property and a 1L Property Course, 24 SANTA CLARA COMPUTER & HIGH TECH L. J. 915 (2008) (co-authored with Rachel Goda)
• Unpublished Work and the Public Domain: The Opening of a New Frontier, 54 J. Copyright Society of the U.S.A. (Winter 2007)
• Podcasting for Corporations and Universities—Look Before You Leap (invited, co-authored with Colette Vogele), J. Internet Law (October 2006)
• The Birth of the Unpublished Public Domain and the International Implications, 24 Cardozo Arts & Ent. L.J. (2006)
• NAFTA, Mexican Trucks and the Border: Making Sense of Years of International Arbitration, Domestic Debates, and the Supreme Court, 31 Transportation L.J. 131 (Spring-Summer 2004)
• Legal and Policy Responses to the Disappearing ‘Teacher Exception,’ or Copyright Ownership in the 21st Century University, 4 Minn. Intell. Prop. Rev. 209 (2003)

General Publications

• Innovation Profile (hour-long interview), Law School Innovation Blog, July 14, 2007,
• Invited Guest, “The State of Play Academy,” Center for Internet and Society, Stanford Law School, Spring 2007
• Guest Blogger (with Rachel Goda), Terra Nova, April 2007,
• Hour-Long Guest, “Hearsay Culture” Radio Show with David Levine, Stanford, October 2006
• Reconstructing Vera Brittain’s War Generation: A Comparative Biography. (UMI: 1998) [doctoral dissertation]
• Ready for Adventures: Oral History Transcript 1996, Margaret H. Jones-Kanaar, a Pioneer Pediatrician, interviewed by Elizabeth Townsend, (Los Angeles: Oral History Program, University of California, Los Angeles, 1996) (a nine-part interview)
• E-Commerce Business Websites, co-written with Whitney Thier, Quirk and Tratos Newsletter, Fall 2000
• Common Ground of War: The Clinician and Cultural Historian in Symbiosis, National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Quarterly, Spring 1996
• Postmodernism and Biography: A Dialogue, co-written with Elizabeth Covington, UCLA Historical Journal, 1995
• This is the World I Create: Gender and Current First World War Scholarship, UCLA Historical Journal, 1994

Education

• J.D., LL.M. University of Arizona, James E. Rogers College of Law (1998 — 2005)
• B.A, M.A., Ph.D. UCLA (1987 — 1998)

Companies

• Professor of Law at Tulane University Tulane University Law School (2017)
• Associate Professor of Law Tulane University (2017)
• Visiting Assistant Professor Seatle University School of Law (2006 — 2007)
• Lecturer London School of Economics (2005 — 2006)

Skills

• Writing
• Public Speaking
• Copyright Law

Other

Legal Writing, Legal Research, Research, Intellectual Property