Ronald K. L. Collins


Ronald Kenneth Leo Collins is the co-founder and co-director of the History Book Festival and co-founder and co-chair of the First Amendment Salons. He was the Harold S. Shefelman Scholar at the University of Washington School of Law. From 2002 to 2009 he was a scholar at the Newseum's First Amendment Center.

Biography

Born in Santa Monica, California, Collins grew up in Southern California. He graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara with a B.A. degree in political philosophy and received a J.D. degree from Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, where he was a member of the Law Review. Afterwards, Collins served as a law clerk to Justice Hans A. Linde on the Oregon Supreme Court and was a Supreme Court Fellow under United States Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger.
After working with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles and the Legal Aid Society of Orange County, Collins was a teaching fellow at Stanford Law School. Thereafter, he taught constitutional law, contracts, and commercial law at Temple Law School and The George Washington University Law School and other schools.
-- 2002, the Los Angeles Times selects The Trials of Lenny Bruce as one of the best books of the year. The following year, Collins and Skover successfully petitioned the governor of New York to posthumously pardon Lenny Bruce. In 2004, they received the Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award.
-- 2009, he served as the president of the Supreme Court Fellows Alumni Association, and in 2011 he received the Association's Administration of Justice award "in recognition of his scholarly and professional achievements in advancing the rule of law."
-- 2010, Collins was a fellow in residence at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He was also on the board of editors of the Washington Independent Review of Books.
-- 2011, Collins became the for SCOTUSblog, a blog devoted to news and analysis concerning the U.S. Supreme Court.
-- 2012, Collins received the Outstanding Faculty Award from the editors of the Washington Law Review. In 2012, the American Society of Legal Writers awarded him a Scribes Book Award for We Must not be Afraid to be Free. In 2013, Mania, a book co-authored with David Skover, was selected by the San Francisco Book Festival as runner up in the best book of American history category.
-- 2014 he became a permanent contributor to the Concurring Opinions blog, for which he wrote the First Amendment News column.
-- Also in 2014, he launched the .
-- 2014 to 2015, he did a series of 12 blog posts on Judge Richard Posner. The series was titled "" Among other things, the series consisted of a number of Q&A interviews Collins did with Posner.
-- 2015 he joined the board of editors of the Journal of Legal Education, a journal published by the American Association of Law Schools.
-- 2016 he became the Editor-in-Chief of the online .
-- 2017 Collins is one of the founders and co-directors of The , which launched in Lewes, Delaware in October of 2017.
-- May 1, 2018 Collins Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein at the Newseum in Washington, D.C.
-- January-April of 2019, he delivered 10 lectures on the Life and Legacy of Simone Weil, at the Lewes, DE., Public Library.
-- February of 2019, he became the Editor-in-Chief of .
-- June-August of 2019, he delivered eight lectures on Justice Holmes and the Civil War at the Lewes, DE., Public Library.
-- September 2019, release of his college e-text book on free speech

Select C-SPAN & Other Video Appearances

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Books

Collins has published more than 60 scholarly articles in publications such as the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, Michigan Law Review, the Supreme Court Review, Texas Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Southern California Law Review, Social Research Journal, Neohelicon, and the Washington Law Review, among others.

Recent Focus

Teaching and writing on the life and philosophy of .
Teaching and writing on Justice Holmes & the Civil War
Collins has published more than 300 articles and reviews in publications such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Washington Times, Detroit Free Press, Miami Herald, Christian Science Monitor, The Forward, Columbia Journalism Review, Legal Times, National Law Journal, American Bar Association Journal, and The Nation.
Collins has also published articles and reviews in blogs or on websites, including SCOTUSblog, ConcurringOpinions blog, FIRE blog, Contracts Profs blog, and on the First Amendment Center Website, among others.