Ronald K. L. Collins

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Ronald K. L. Collins is a scholar at the Washington, D.C., office of the First Amendment Center. He writes and lectures on freedom of expression and oversees the online library component of the First Amendment Center’s Web site.

Before coming to the Center, Collins served as a law clerk to Justice Hans A. Linde on the Oregon Supreme Court and thereafter was a Judicial Fellow under Chief Justice Warren Burger at the United States Supreme Court.

He has taught constitutional law and commercial law at Temple Law School and The George Washington University Law School, among other schools. Collins has written constitutional briefs that were submitted to the Supreme Court and various other federal and state high courts. He has also published some 50 articles in scholarly journals such as the Supreme Court Review and the Harvard, Stanford, and Michigan law reviews. His writings on the First Amendment have appeared in Columbia Journalism Review, The Nation, The New York Times and The Washington Post, among numerous other publications.

Collins is co-author (with David Skover) of The Trials of Lenny Bruce (2002) and The Death of Discourse (1996/ 2nd ed., 2005), and the editor of Constitutional Government in America (1981) and The Death of Contract (1995). His next book, with Sam Chaltain, is We Must Not Be Afraid to be Free (Oxford University Press, 2007) followed by Mania: The Madcap Stories of the Lives that Launched a Generation (with David Skover, 2008) and Those Who Won Our Independence: Justice Louis Brandeis & His famous Free Speech Opinion (with David Skover, Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).

In 2003, Collins and Skover successfully petitioned the governor of New York to posthumously pardon Lenny Bruce. In 2004, they received the Hugh Hefner First Amendment Award. Their latest scholarly articles are: “What is War? Free Speech in Wartime,” 36 Rutgers Law Journal 833 (2005), “Curious Concurrence: Justice Brandeis’s Vote in Whitney v. California,” 2005 Supreme Court Review 333-397, and “Foreword: The Landmark Free-Speech Case that Wasn’t: The Nike v. Kasky Story,” 54 Case Western Reserve Law Review 965-1047 (2004).

Collins has also appeared on Penn and Teller's Bullshit!, the "Profanity" episode.

In September of 2006 Collins conducted a public interview with Anthony Lewis at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. A transcript of that interview can be found here.

[edit] Selected publications

[edit] Books

The Trials of Lenny Bruce
The Death of Discourse
The Death of Contract, editor
Constitutional Government in America, editor
Developments in State Constitutional Law, Bradley D. McGraw, editor (contributor)
The Legal Rights of Citizens with Mental Retardation, Lawrence A. Kane, Jr., editor (contributor)
Signs of Life in the USA: Readings in Popular Culture for Writers, Sonia Maasik & Jack Solomon, editors (contributor)
Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, David M. O'Brien, editor (contributor)
Simone Weil's Philosophy of Culture, Richard A. Bell, editor (contributor)
Simone Weil: The Way of Justice as Compassion, Richard A. Bell, editor (contributor)
We the Media, Don Hazen & Julie Winokur, editors (contributor)