Professor Mary Anne Franks

Mary Anne Franks, Professor of Law, teaches criminal law, criminal procedure, family law, First Amendment law, Second Amendment law, and Law, Policy, and Technology. She is also the President and Legislative & Tech Policy Director of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a nonprofit organization dedicated to combating online abuse and discrimination.

In 2013, Professor Franks drafted the first model criminal statute on nonconsensual pornography (sometimes referred to as “revenge porn”), which has been used as the template for multiple state laws and for pending federal legislation on the issue. She also served as the reporter for the Uniform Law Commission’s 2018 Uniform Civil Remedies for the Unauthorized Disclosure of Intimate Images Act. She regularly advises legislators and tech industry leaders, including Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft, on issues relating to online privacy, extortion, harassment, and threats.

Professor Franks is the author of The Cult of the Constitution: Guns, Speech, and the Internet (Stanford University Press, forthcoming 2019). Her legal scholarship has appeared in publications such as the Harvard Law Review, the California Law Review, and the UCLA Law Review. She has also authored numerous articles for the popular press, including the Atlantic, the Guardian, and TIME Magazine. Professor Franks has delivered more than a hundred lectures to a range of audiences in the U.S. and internationally, including law schools, domestic violence organizations, law firms, and tech companies.

Professor Franks holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School as well as doctorate and master’s degrees from Oxford University, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. Before she began teaching at UM, Professor Franks was a Bigelow Fellow and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School and taught social studies and philosophy at Harvard University. In 2013, she was a Visiting Professor at the University of Navarra in Pamplona, Spain.