A Conversation with Mary Anne Franks

Dr. Mary Anne Franks, Professor of Law and Michael R. Klein Distinguished Scholar Chair at the University of Miami School of Law, is an expert on the intersection of civil rights and technology. She is an Affiliated Faculty member of the University of Miami Department of Philosophy and an Affiliate Fellow of the Yale Law School Information Society Project, and author of an award-winning book, The Cult of the Constitution: Our Deadly Devotion to Guns and Free Speech from Stanford Press, published in 2019.

In addition to her academic responsibilities, she is President and Legislative & Tech Policy Director of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a nonprofit organization that combats online abuse and discrimination. In 2013, she drafted a model criminal statute on nonconsensual pornography- “revenge porn”- which has served as the template for multiple state laws and for proposed federal legislation to tackle the issue.

Dr. Franks holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School as well as a doctorate and a master’s degree from Oxford University, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. She previously taught at the University of Chicago Law School as a Bigelow Fellow and Lecturer in Law and at Harvard University as a lecturer in social studies and philosophy.

This month, Tech Policy Press had a chance to catch up with her about her ideas, her work, and her critics.