Mary Anne Franks

Mary Anne Franks is a Professor of Law at the University of Miami School of Law, where she teaches family law, criminal law, criminal procedure, and First Amendment law. Her scholarly work focuses on online harassment, free speech, discrimination, and violence. Franks also writes for the popular press, including the Atlantic, the Guardian, the Independent, and the Daily Dot. She is a regular contributor to the Huffington Post. As a frequent legal commentator in the media on cyberlaw and criminal law issues, Franks has been quoted in publications such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New Yorker, and has appeared on the Today Show, HuffPost Live, and Al Jazeera America. Franks is a co-producer of the 2015 film Hot Girls Wanted, a documentary produced by the actress Rashida Jones that examines the "professional amateur" porn industry.

Franks is noted for her work advocating for legislative, technological, and social reform on the issue of nonconsensual pornography ("revenge porn"). She has been instrumental in drafting recent state legislation against the practice in the United States. She is working with Congresswoman Jackie Speier on a federal criminal bill, titled the Intimate Privacy Protection Act. Franks also advises major tech companies on their privacy and abuse policies. In 2015, several major tech companies, most notably Google, announced that they would be adding sexually explicit images published without consent to their privacy and removal policies. In 2014, Franks was named one of "The Heroes in the Fight to Save the Internet" by the Daily Dot.

Franks is an instructor in Krav Maga, a self-defense system developed for the military in Israel.

Career

Franks is a Rhodes scholar who earned her MPhil and a DPhil in Modern Languages and Literature from the University of Oxford. She also holds a JD from Harvard Law School and a BA in philosophy and English literature from Loyola University New Orleans.

She was a Bigelow Fellow & Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School 2008-2010 and a Lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard University 2005-2008. In 2013, she was a Visiting Professor at the University of Navarra in Pamplona, Spain.

She is the Vice-President and Legislative & Tech Policy Director of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a nonprofit organization that seeks to challenge cyber harassment.

Selected works

Articles

Academic Scholarship

External links

• Personal website