Laura Quilter is an attorney at law, licensed to practice in Massachusetts and California. She offers a boutique legal practice, selectively supporting creators, scholars, activists, and nonprofits, in copyright, First Amendment, and other information policy matters.
Laura has more than twenty years of experience in supporting the public interest in copyright, trademark, rights of privacy and publicity, defamation, speech, and related areas of information and technology law.
She currently runs the Copyright and Information Policy service at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, University Libraries. Laura also maintains an adjunct faculty appointment at the Simmons University School of Library and Information Science, where she has taught “Intellectual Freedom” since 2008. She previously taught public interest tech lawyering at the Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, and has taught as an adjunct at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Legal Studies program and at the University of Illinois at Chicago Honors College.
Laura graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law (then Boalt Hall) in 2003, interning at the Samuelson Clinic, the ACLU, and the information policy consultancy office of Lesley Harris and Associates.
She transitioned to law school after engaging in a wide array of media and Internet activism as a librarian in the 1990s – including supporting women’s and alternate press organizations, organizing around media consolidation and Internet censorship, and teaching at early community computing centers beginning in the early 1990s. During this time, Laura experienced a few minutes (not necessarily fifteen) of early “Internet fame” by developing the first website dedicated to feminist science fiction.
Laura began her professional career in public interest as a librarian, after earning a M.S.L.I.S. from the University of Kentucky in 1993 and running the agency libraries at the Kentucky Dept. for Environmental Protection. She had worked in libraries since her early teens and through college. Also during college, Laura worked at the Crimson White, the independent newspaper of the University of Alabama, gaining a passion for free and independent journalism that continues to this day.
Laura is admitted to the bar in California (2003) and Massachusetts (2005).