Go for it. My name's at the bottom of the page and I'm on LinkedIn.

Working on it, actually. It's been very hard to find lawyers who will consider taking the job.

They were all sent to other umn email addresses of professors in my department. A few of them contained a URL, but many were plain text.

Yes. In chrome only:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_and_Di...

It gives JavaScript access to its very own, empty, sand-boxed VFS. However, you can give the page access to directories manually with drag-n-drop or a directory selecting input tag. So if the app needs access to just one parent directory then you're good to go. If you need the app to have indiscriminate access to the entire filesystem then you might be able to give it C:/ (or whatever other root dir) but I have never actually tried it.

Given Google’s shift to focussing on standard and standards track web platform features in Chrome, and tendency to eliminate everything else, I wouldn't bet on this (which predates that strong focus) being around forever.