David M. Skover

I am a Professor of Law at Seattle University, where I've taught Constitutional Law, First Amendment Law, and Mass Media Theory for 30 some years. In the course of my professional life, I've written books that have been inspired by my course reading and research.

My first coauthored book, "Tactics of Legal Reasoning," was geared for students who needed a primer on the intellectual moves that lawyers and judges take to construct and deconstruct legal arguments. My second coauthored book, "The Death of Discourse," was directed to a general audience interested in the ways that modern mass media, advertising, and the pornographic culture have dramatically changed the character of public discourse.

Then came "The Trials of Lenny Bruce," a book that focused on the obscenity trials of the famous Jewish comedian of the 1950s and 1960s. Two books came out in 2013 -- first, "Mania," a narrative account of the outrageous lives of, and the outraged literature produced by the major Beat figures (Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and others) in the early 1950s; and second, "On Dissent," an exploration of the meaning of the concept of dissent in contemporary America.

They were followed by three more: "The Judge: 26 Machiavellian Lessons," a dynamic compendium of career advice for federal court judges; "Robotica: Speech Rights and Artificial Intelligence," a defense of free speech protection for robotic expression; and "The People v. The Poet-Publisher," a stirring account of the celebrated American poet and publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and his battle for First Amendment protection for erotic poetry.