Bio
James Robert Quick teaches Legal Research and Writing, a subject he regards as the only law school course that is graded twice: once by the professor, and then for the rest of a lawyer’s career by judges, opposing counsel, and clients, none of whom explain their reasoning.
He learned the second grading system first. As a law clerk in the San Francisco District Attorney’s Homicide Unit, he drafted motions in murder trials: motions to consolidate co-defendant prosecutions, oppositions to defense efforts to quash search warrants under the Fourth Amendment and the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act, trial briefs, and motions in limine. The motions succeeded, which in that setting is the only rubric on offer. He now serves as General Counsel of Autharva, Inc., a San Francisco agentic AI cybersecurity company, where the daily work of a one-lawyer legal department (contracts, IP strategy, privacy & AI compliance, and venture financing), turns on precise drafting under time pressure. Before law, he spent nearly three decades leading cybersecurity practices at EY, Cisco, PwC, and Netscape; he still maintains his CISSP credential.
His scholarship grounds cybersecurity concerns within the broader spaces of national security law and international criminal law, examining the structural mismatch between territorially grounded legal doctrine and digitally networked infrastructure, with articles under review on extraterritorial jurisdiction in cyber conflict, the data ontology of predictive policing, and the failure of record-based privacy law to comprehend generative AI.
The classroom, finally, is familiar terrain. Professor Quick teaches Cybersecurity and Cyber Crime and Introduction to the U.S. Legal System at USC Gould School of Law, lectures on digital contracts at the Université Catholique de Lyon, and began teaching in 1990 as a professor of philosophy, a discipline that shares with legal writing the unsentimental conviction that an argument either holds or it does not. His students learn to write the way practicing lawyers must: for readers who are busy, skeptical, and deciding something that matters.
Bar Admission
California
Education
University of Southern California, Gould School of Law, LL.M., 2023
Université Catholique de Lyon, Faculté de Droit, LL.M., Digital Law and Technology, 2022
University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, Certificate in Law and Technology, 2021
University of London, LL.B. (Hons), 2021
Duquesne University, Ph.D., 1991
Duquesne University, M.A., 1988
St. Mary’s University, B.A., 1986