Michael Townsend

  • Faculty Director, Ph.D. in Law Program
  • Associate Professor of Law

Contact

Phone: (206) 543-4907
Email: met@u.washington.edu

Michael Townsend

Education

B.A. 1973, Ph.D. 1982, University of Michigan J.D. 1989, Yale University

Curriculum Vitae

Areas of Expertise

Contracts

Selected Publications

  • Mike Townsend, Teaching Contradiction: A Case Study, 33 Okla. City U.L. Rev. 97-114 (2008).
  • Mike Townsend & Thomas Richardson, Probability and Statistics in the Legal Curriculum: A Case Study in Disciplinary Aspects of Interdisciplinarity, 40 Duq. L. Rev. 447-88 (2002).
  • Mike Townsend, Cardozo's Allegheny College Opinion: A Case Study in Law as an Art, 33 Hous. L. Rev. 1103-53 (1996).

See the full list under the Publications tab below.

Professor Townsend joined the UW law school faculty in 1992 and has taught Contracts, Torts, Quantitative Methods in the Law, and Copyrights and Trademarks. He also has taught mathematical logic in the Department of Philosophy. Prior to his arrival at the UW, he was on the mathematics faculty at Harvey Mudd College, and the computer science faculty at Columbia University. He was a research scientist at Bell Laboratories.

Professor Townsend's interests include law, science, and technology and the use of quantitative methods in legal reasoning. He has published on the use of statistics in legal proceedings and on mathematics and theoretical computer science. He has served as a referee for several technical journals. While at Yale Law School, he was Articles Editor for the Yale Law Journal and Senior Editor for The Yale Journal on Regulation. Also at Yale, he was a John M. Olin Fellow in Law, Economics and Public Policy.   

Peer Reviewed Journals & Law Reviews

  • Mike Townsend, Teaching Contradiction: A Case Study, 33 Okla. City U.L. Rev. 97-114 (2008).
  • Mike Townsend & Thomas Richardson, Probability and Statistics in the Legal Curriculum: A Case Study in Disciplinary Aspects of Interdisciplinarity, 40 Duq. L. Rev. 447-88 (2002).
  • Mike Townsend, Implications of Foundational Crises in Mathematics: A Case Study in Interdisciplinary Legal Research, 71 Wash. L. Rev. 51-149 (1996).
  • Mike Townsend, Cardozo's Allegheny College Opinion: A Case Study in Law as an Art, 33 Hous. L. Rev. 1103-53 (1996).
  • Mike Townsend, Complexity for Type-2 Relations, 31 Notre Dame J. Formal Logic 241-62 (1990).
  • Mike Townsend, Congressional Abrogation of Indian Treaties: Reevaluation and Reform, 98 Yale L.J. 793-812 (1989).
  • Mike Townsend, A Polynomial Jump Operator, 68 Info. & Control 146-69 (1986).

Books or Treatises

  • Michael Townsend, Discrete Mathematics: Applied Combinatorics and Graph Theory (Benjamin-Cummings 1987). 387 pages.

Recent UW Law News