Founded by Harvard Law Professor and Berkman Center founder Charles Nesson, GPSTS has three programmatic goals: offering poker strategic thinking workshops to schools and community centers, particularly in underprivileged neighborhoods; sponsoring team poker matches between law, business and other professional schools; and conducting seminars, panel discussions and conferences that explore poker as a means to teach strategic thinking and related public policy issues.

GPSTS is organized both as a for-profit and a non-profit corporation. Revenue from the for-profit entity is committed to the non-profit GPSTS Foundation to support open education and iCommons.

“Teaching truth leads to and through teaching poker as a skill in seeing and understanding another’s point of view. It’s for anyone who is eager to learn how the rhetorical world works and connect it to the physical.”

—Charles Nesson

Charles Nesson, Founder and President

The William F. Weld Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Charles Nesson is the author of Evidence, with Murray and Green, and has participated in several cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, including Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals. Nesson defended Daniel Ellsberg in the Pentagon Papers case and consulted on the case against W.R. Grace that was adapted into the film A Civil Action.

Nesson attended Harvard College as an undergraduate, and Harvard Law School. After joining the list of only a handful of people in history to have graduated summa cum laude from the Law School, he was a Law Clerk to Justice John Marshall Harlan II on the United States Supreme Court, 1965 term. After working in the Department of Justice, Nesson joined the Harvard Law School faculty in 1966, and was tenured in 1969.

He is currently leading a project to reify the university as a meta player in cyberspace, to legitimize and teach poker and the value of strategic poker thinking, and to advance restorative justice in Jamaica. During the academic year, he teaches a course in the law and practice of evidence. In the fall of 2006, he taught CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion, which welcomed the participation of the Internet community at large through the Second Life virtual world. In 2007 he is teaching, in addition to CyberOne, Trials in Second Life and a reading group on freedom.

He blogs regularly at “eon,” http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/nesson/blog/

Andrew M. Woods, Executive Director

Andrew Woods is a student at Harvard Law School. An avid poker player, Mr. Woods has used poker throughout his academic career as a vehicle of continuing education and as a valuable financial resource.

At Harvard Law School, Mr. Woods is active in a number of philanthropic, student life and professional organizations. He is the founder and president of the Massachusetts Committee for Human Rights on Mental Retardation at Harvard Law School, serves as the Sr. Director of Events of HL Central, the premiere professional networking community for Harvard Law School students, and acts as a consultant to several different administrative panels on student life.

Prior to attending law school, Mr. Woods traveled extensively and pursued a variety of interests within the private sector, including spending time as an assistant instructor.

Mr. Woods attended the University of California, Los Angeles, graduating magna cum laude while earning a B.A. in history, with a minor in political science. At UCLA, Mr. Woods founded the “Bruin Casino Gaming Society,” the first officially recognized student organization devoted to the study and teaching of poker in the United States.

Mr. Woods can be contacted at amwoods@law.harvard.edu.

Lawrence Lessig, Adviser

Lawrence Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school’s Center for Internet and Society. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, he was the Berkman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a professor at the University of Chicago. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court.

Professor Lessig represented web site operator Eric Eldred in the ground-breaking case Eldred v. Ashcroft, a challenge to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. He has won numerous awards, including the Free Software Foundation’s Freedom Award and was named one of Scientific American’s Top 50 Visionaries, for arguing “against interpretations of copyright that could stifle innovation and discourse online.”

Professor Lessig is the author of Free Culture (2004), The Future of Ideas (2001), Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999) and Code 2.0 (2006). He chairs the Creative Commons project, and serves on the board of the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Public Library of Science and Public Knowledge. He is also a columnist for Wired.

Professor Lessig earned a B.A. in economics and a B.S. in management from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in philosophy from Cambridge and a J.D. from Yale.

Professor Lessig teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, contracts and the law of cyberspace.

For more information, please see Steven Levy’s profile of Professor Lessig in the October 2002 issue of Wired: Lawrence Lessig’s Supreme Showdown.

Jonathan Cohen is the president of The Weiser Group, a strategic communications firm based in New York. Mr. Cohen began a career in broadcast journalism in 1982 with the Wall Street Journal Radio Network and the Sheridan Broadcasting Network. Subsequently, as an aide to New York Mayor Ed Koch he managed high-priority special projects involving voting regulation reforms, drug enforcement policy development and crisis management.

In 1991, Mr. Cohen joined the staff of Edgar Bronfman, Sr. as an adviser to the chairman and director of public policy for Joseph E. Seagram and Sons, Inc. During this time, he developed an international fellowship program in urban government for the human rights organization Freedom House, and helped create United Nations Watch, a non-governmental organization with an international board of trustees headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.

In 1995 Mr. Cohen became the publisher of Commentary, a leading journal of public policy and cultural criticism. During this period he continued to publish his own essays and reviews and to provide regular editorials for Bloomberg Radio.

In 2000, Mr. Cohen joined Mercator Software, a publicly traded global company, helping to guide the company to its eventual sale to Ascential Software in the fall of 2003.

He holds a B.A. from Kenyon College and a J.D. from New York Law School.

For more information

To learn more about GPSTS, including information about how to establish GPSTS workshops and teaching seminars, please write to us at globalpoker@gmail.com.