Mary Anne Franks

Dr. Mary Anne Franks is the Eugene L. and Barbara A. Bernard Professor in Intellectual Property, Technology, and Civil Rights Law at George Washington University School of Law and the President of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative. Her areas of expertise include First and Second Amendment law, law and technology, criminal law and procedure, and family law. Her first book, The Cult of the Constitution: Our Deadly Devotion to Guns and Free Speech (Stanford University Press 2019), won a 2020 Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal and the 2020 Association of American Publishers PROSE Excellence Award in Social Sciences. She holds a DPhil from Oxford University, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar, and a JD from Harvard Law School. Previously, she was the Michael R. Klein Distinguished Scholar Chair at the University of Miami School of Law, a Bigelow Fellow and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School, and a Lecturer in social studies and philosophy at Harvard University. She is Taiwanese-American and originally from Pine Bluff, Arkansas.