Peter Johnston
Law Clerk at Harvard University
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolPeter Johnston is a law-trained technologist with 11 years of engineering experience who now serves as a law clerk at Covington & Burling in San Francisco after earning a JD from Harvard Law School. He combines deep software and security engineering chops from roles at Dropbox, Flexport, Pilot, and Retool with academic teaching and research experience at Stanford and Harvard. At Harvard he balanced editorial work for the Journal of Law & Technology, teaching fellowships in both legal and computer systems courses, and research assisting—an uncommon blend that bridges legal analysis and systems security. His background includes hands-on security engineering at startups and large product teams, giving him a practical lens on regulatory, technical, and operational risk. Peter’s trajectory shows a deliberate pivot from building secure distributed systems to shaping tech policy and litigation strategy, bringing technical fluency to complex legal matters. Based in San Francisco, he’s comfortable explaining low-level technical trade-offs to legal audiences and translating regulatory goals back into engineering requirements.
11 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Law - JD, Doctor of Law - JD at Harvard Law SchoolBachelor of Science (B.S.) Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (B.S.) Computer Science at Stanford University
English, French, Spanish
Github Skills (66)
retool10
deploying10
kubernetes-deployment9
refactoring9
elisp8
istanbul8
npm-package8
eslint-plugin8
continuous-deployment8
javascript7
linter7
melpa7
emacs-lisp7
emacs7
python7
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
peterwj/advent-of-code
Jan 2016 - Jan 2016
Contributions:26 commits, 17 pushes, 1 branch in 22 days
peterwj/warehouse
Apr 2015 - Jun 2015
Contributions:50 pushes, 1 branch in 1 month
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