For 34 years I taught courses on freedom of speech and the press at the University of California at Berkeley, teaching thousands of undergraduates and graduate journalism students about the First Amendment. In recent years I have also taught senior citizens at the Osher Lifelong Learning program at UC Berkeley and at the Fromm Institute at the University of San Francisco.

I practiced law for 45 years. As a San Francisco lawyer, I specialized in unusual litigation, including constitutional law.  I argued three cases before the United States Supreme Court (including two First Amendment cases) and dozens of cases in lower federal and state supreme courts, and I served as lead counsel in many notable state and federal trials.

I graduated from the Harvard Law School in 1963 and, after a Fulbright fellowship in comparative law, I spent three years with a New York law firm.  This was followed by nearly ten years with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund doing civil rights law.  I returned to teach at Harvard in 1977.  I founded my own law firm in San Francisco in 1978 and served as its senior partner until I left active practice to concentrate on teaching. 

I have published dozens of articles in various magazines, newspapers, law reviews, and online sites.  My work has appeared in the New York Times, Politico, USA Today, Wired, the San Francisco Chronicle, Harvard Magazine, Medium, the Threepenny Review and many other publications. I served as Legal Affairs Correspondent for KQED television, winning numerous awards for news and documentaries on legal subjects.  I was Legal Consultant to the PBS "We The People" series on the Bicentennial of the Constitution.
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Besides Free Speech for Some, I am the author of Free Speech: Supreme Court Opinions from the Beginning to the Roberts Court (Cognella 2019), and Figures of Speech: First Amendment Heroes and Villains (Berrett-Koehler 2011). [See Books]