Abstract
We prove that the Chern-Simons-Dirac equations in the Coulomb gauge are locally well-posed from initial data in H-s with s > 1/4. To study nonlinear Wave or Dirac equations at this regularity generally requires the presence of null structure. The novel point here is that we make no use of the null structure of the system. Instead we exploit the additional elliptic structure in the Coulomb gauge together with the bilinear Strichartz estimates of Klainerman-Tataru.