Mary Anne Franks

Mary Anne Franks, Professor of Law, teaches criminal law, criminal procedure, First Amendment law, family law, and Law, Policy, and Technology. She is the Vice-President and Legislative & Tech Policy Director of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a nonprofit organization dedicated to combating online abuse and discrimination. Professor Franks authored the first model criminal statute on “revenge porn,” the unauthorized disclosure of private, sexually explicit images, and helped draft the federal Intimate Privacy Protection Act, introduced in Congress in July 2016. She is the reporter for the Uniform Law Commission’s Committee on the Unauthorized Disclosure of Intimate Images and has advised both state and federal legislators on laws relating to sexual privacy, extortion, harassment, and threats. She also works with tech industry leaders, including Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft, on privacy and abuse issues. Professor Franks is the author of Enemies of the Constitution: Fanaticism in American Law and Politics (Stanford University Press, forthcoming 2018). She has published more than two dozen articles and essays in publications such as the California Law Review, the UCLA Law Review, and the Illinois Law Review, as well as numerous articles for the popular press, including the Atlantic, the Guardian, TIME Magazine, and the Huffington Post. Professor Franks has delivered over 70 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 was 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.