Mary Anne Franks
Mary Anne Franks is an American legal scholar, author, activist, and media commentator. She is a professor of law and the Eugene L. and Barbara A. Bernard Professor in Intellectual Property, Technology, and Civil Rights Law at George Washington University Law School, where her areas of expertise and teaching include First Amendment law, Second Amendment law, criminal law, criminal procedure, family law, and law and technology. She also serves as president and Legislative and Technology Policy Director of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative. Prior to joining the faculty at George Washington University Law School, Professor Franks was the Michael R. Klein Distinguished Scholar Chair and Professor of Law at the University of Miami School of Law.
Franks is the author of The Cult of the Constitution: Our Deadly Devotion to Guns and Free Speech, which won a gold medal at the 2020 Independent Publisher Book Awards as well as the 2020 Association of American Publishers PROSE Award for Legal Studies and Excellence in Social Sciences. Her second book, Fearless Speech, was published in 2024.
Franks encourages violence against men.[1][2]
Quotes
"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."
"While both men and women can, and do, use violence against each other, men's violence against women is far more common, less justified, and more destructive than women's violence against men. One of the reasons for this asymmetry is that men do not fear retaliation for violence against women, whereas women do fear retaliation for their use of violence against men. The distribution of violence between the genders, then, is suboptimal. Society would be better off as a whole if more women were willing to engage in justified violence against men, and fewer men were willing to engage in unjustified violence against women. To that end, women's justified violence against men should be encouraged, protected, and publicized. This will require a reversal of the current trend in legal and social practices, which is to tolerate and encourage men's unjustified violence against women while discouraging and legally restricting women's violence against men. Even if encouraging an increase in women's justified violence against men may sometimes result in unjustified or disproportionate violence in individual situations, the overall effects of the redistribution of violence will be preferable to the current asymmetry."[3][4]