Dr. Mary Anne Franks is the Professor of Law and Dean’s Distinguished Scholar at the University of Miami School of Law, where she teaches First Amendment law, Second Amendment law, criminal law and procedure, family law, and law and technology. She is also the President and Legislative and Tech Policy Director of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a nonprofit organization that uses the power of law, policy, and technology to protect equal rights. In 2013, Dr. 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 served as the reporter for the Uniform Law Commission’s 2018 Uniform Civil Remedies for the Unauthorized Disclosure of Intimate Images Act, and regularly advises legislators and tech industry leaders, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter, on issues relating to online privacy, extortion, harassment, and threats. Professor Franks is the author of The Cult of the Constitution: Our Deadly Devotion to Guns and Free Speech (Stanford Press, 2019). Her scholarship has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, California Law Review, and UCLA Law Review, among others. Dr. Franks holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School along with a doctorate and master’s degrees from Oxford University. Dr. Franks 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.
Six years after lawmakers first considered the issue of nonconsensual pornography, New York has criminalized the practice. We wholeheartedly support the effort in our role as legal scholars and as advocates for the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI). One of us (Franks) drafted the first model statute criminalizing “revenge porn” and worked on New York’s…
The fight for civil rights in the United States has historically focused on equal access to physical spaces: schools, workplaces, lunch counters, hotels, voting booths. This emphasis is understandable, because these were the places where people learned, worked, socialized, and voted. Civil rights activists made clear that people who are excluded from, or exploited in,…
