Dr. Mary Anne Franks is a law professor, activist, and Krav Maga instructor. She is a Professor of Law at the University of Miami School of Law, where she teaches criminal law, criminal procedure, and family law, as well as seminars on topics such as free speech and bias in the law. She is the Legislative & Tech Policy Director and Vice-President of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), a non-profit organization dedicated to challenging online harassment and abuse. In that capacity, she has worked with legislators in more than two dozen states to draft legislation against the non-consensual distribution of sexually explicit images, and is also working with Congresswoman Jackie Speier (D-CA) on federal legislation.
Before joining the UM faculty, Dr. Franks was a Bigelow Fellow and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago School of Law and a Lecturer at Harvard University. Dr. Franks received her J.D. from Harvard Law School in 2007. She received her D.Phil in 2004 and M.Phil in 2001 from Oxford University, where she studied on a Rhodes Scholarship. She received her B.A. in philosophy and English from Loyola University New Orleans in 1999. She is originally from Pine Bluff, Arkansas.
Dr. Franks is a frequent legal commentator in the media on issues of criminal law, family law, and online harassment. Her editorials have appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Independent, The New York Daily News, and The Daily Dot. Her media appearances include The Today Show, Viewpoint with Eliot Spitzer, HuffPost Live, and NPR, and she is frequently quoted in publications such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and The San Francisco Chronicle. You can see a select list of her media appearances here. Mary Anne is also a Huffington Post contributor.
Dr. Franks’s scholarly work focuses on violence, discrimination, and free speech. Her articles have been published in the University of California Law Review, the California Law Review, and the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, among others.
