Ronald K. L. Collins is the Harold S. Shefelman Scholar at the University of Washington Law School. Before coming to the law school, Collins served as a law clerk to Justice Hans A. Linde on the Oregon Supreme Court, a Supreme Court Fellow under Chief Justice Warren Burger, and a scholar at the Washington, DC, office of the Newseum’s First Amendment Center.
Collins has written constitutional briefs that were submitted to the Supreme Court and various other federal and state high courts. In addition to the books that he coauthored with David Skover, he is the editor of The Fundamental Holmes: A Free Speech Chronicle and Reader (2010) and coauthor with Sam Chaltain of We Must Not Be Afraid to Be Free (2011). His last solo book was Nuanced Absolutism: Floyd Abrams and the First Amendment (2013). His next book is: First Things First—A Modern Coursebook on Free Speech Fundamentals (coauthored with Will Creeley and David Hudson, Jr., 2019). Collins is the book editor of SCOTUSblog and writes a weekly blog (First Amendment News), which appears on the FIRE website. In 2010, Collins was a fellow in residence at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He is also the co-founder of the History Book Festival (Lewes, Delaware).
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David M. Skover is the Fredric C. Tausend Professor of Constitutional Law at Seattle University School of Law. He teaches, writes, and lectures in the fields of federal constitutional law, federal jurisdiction, and mass communications theory and the First Amendment.
Skover graduated from the Woodrow Wilson School of International and Domestic Affairs at Princeton University. He received his law degree from Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal. Thereafter, he served as a law clerk for Judge Jon O. Newman at the Federal District Court for the District of Connecticut and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. In addition to the books that he coauthored with Ronald Collins, he is the coauthor with Pierre Schlag of Tactics of Legal Reasoning (1986).
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Together, Collins and Skover have authored The Death of Discourse (1996 and 2005), The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall & Rise of an American Icon (2002 and 2012), Mania: The Outraged & Outrageous Lives That Launched a Cultural Revolution (2013), On Dissent: Its Meaning in America (2013), When Money Speaks: The McCutcheon Decision, Campaign Finance Laws, and the First Amendment (2014), The Judge: 26 Machiavelian Lessons (2017), and Robotica: Speech Rights & Artificial Intellligence (2018). They have also coauthored numerous scholarly articles in various journals including the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Texas Law Review, and the Supreme Court Review, among other publications. The Trials of Lenny Bruce (revised and expanded) and Mania are available in e-book form. They are also the co-directors (with Lee Levine) of the First Amendment Salons (Washington, D.C, New York City, and New Haven).