Mary Anne Franks

Mary Anne Franks is an American legal scholar, author, activist, and media commentator. She is a professor of law and Dean's Distinguished Scholar at the University of Miami School of Law, where she teaches family law, criminal law, criminal procedure, and First Amendment law, and she serves as both president and legislative & tech policy director of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative. Her scholarly work focuses on online harassment, free speech, discrimination, and violence. Franks also writes for various news media outlets, 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 she 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 has worked with Congresswoman Jackie Speier on a federal criminal bill, the Intimate Privacy Protection Act (IPPA), which evolved into the ENOUGH Act, and again into the SHIELD Act. The SHIELD Act is now part of the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2021, which the United States House of Representatives passed with bipartisan support in March 2021. 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 the author of The Cult of the Constitution: Our Deadly Devotion to Guns and Free Speech, which went on to win a gold medal at the 2020 Independent Publisher Book Awards as well as the 2020 Association of American Publishers PROSE Awards for Legal Studies and Excellence in Social Sciences. Her second book, "Fearless Speech", is expected in 2022.
Early life and education.
Mary Anne Franks was born in Indiana to Kang Tu-Kwei, a Taiwanese woman, and Jesse Franks, a white American World War II veteran who passed away when Franks was two years old. After her father's death, Franks spent the vast majority of her childhood in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, a location that Franks has described as "not the most racially sensitive place." She attended Loyola University New Orleans and majored in philosophy and English literature, with a classics minor. Recognizing her academic promise, then-dean of arts and sciences Frank E. Scully encouraged Franks to apply for the Rhodes Scholarship, which she was successfully awarded in December 1998. Franks graduated summa cum laude from Loyola with her BA in May 1999 and enrolled at Oxford University that autumn, earning her MPhil in European literature, with distinction, in June 2001 and her DPhil in modern languages and literature in January 2004. Her examination field of continental philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, gender theory, and political theory culminated in her doctoral thesis, "Enjoying Women: Sex, Psychoanalysis, and the Political." Franks then went on to earn her JD from Harvard Law School, where she served as senior executive editor of the "Harvard Journal of Law & Gender" and executive editor of the "Harvard Human Rights Journal". During her law school career, she also received awards including the Harvard Law School Association Alumnae Fellowship, Reginald Lewis International Internship, and Chayes International Public Service Fellow in 2005, as well as the National Association of Women Lawyers Outstanding Law School Student Award in 2007. Franks graduated cum laude in 2007.
Career.
Between 2004 and 2005, Franks taught courses in ethics, world religions, and introductory philosophy within the Department of Humanities at Quincy College, Massachusetts. During her time at Harvard Law School, Franks clerked for the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court the summer after her 1L year and at Debevoise & Plimpton the summer after her 2L year. She also worked from 2005 to 2008 as a lecturer for the Department of Social Studies and as a teaching fellow for the government, philosophy, and English departments. From 2008 to 2010, she was a Bigelow Fellow and lecturer in law at the University of Chicago Law School as well as a faculty affiliate for the Center for Gender Studies. In 2013, she served as a visiting professor at the University of Navarra in Pamplona, Spain, and during the summer of 2018, she taught a course on cybercrime for New York Law School's summer abroad program in London.
Since 2014, Franks has worked in various capacities with the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), a nonprofit organization that seeks to combat cyber harassment, nonconsenual pornography, and online abuse through legislation, tech policy reform, and victim support: she served as CCRI's vice president from 2014 to 2018 and succeeded CCRI founder Holly Jacobs as president in 2018. In addition to her consecutive terms of vice presidency and presidency, she has maintained the title of Legislative & Tech Policy Director since 2014.
Franks has been teaching law courses at the University of Miami School of Law since 2010. Between 2010 and 2015, Franks served as an Associate Professor of Law and was promoted to a Professor of Law in 2015. In 2019, Franks was recognized as a Dean's Distinguished Scholar for the Profession, an honor bestowed upon law faculty members whose scholarly contributions to the legal profession are significant and influential.
Personal life.
Franks is Taiwanese-American.
While Franks is best known for her legal scholarship and activism, she is also an instructor in Krav Maga, a self-defense system developed for the military in Israel. On the topic of women's empowerment through honing self-defense skills, Franks said, "Society puts a lot of focus on women as objects as opposed to women asserting their subject-hood. I’m concerned with ways that women can create a relationship with their bodies that’s about making them stronger, faster, as well as more secure." She is also a vocal proponent of hand-to-hand self-defense techniques over the use of firearms: "What troubles me about Florida when it comes to the psychology of self-defense is that our answer for defending ourselves is always a gun. Krav Maga is a nuanced approach to defending oneself and protecting one’s space. You can respond effectively, but no one gets shot, no one dies."