Brian L. Frye

Frye was born in San Francisco, California.[7] He received a BA in Cinema Studies from the University of California at Berkeley in 1994 and an MFA in Filmmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1997.[8] He decided to attend Georgetown Law School in 2002, a decision profiled in The Washington Post,[9] but received his JD from the New York University School of Law in 2005. While working as an independent filmmaker, artist, and critic, he taught as a visiting professor at Hampshire College before attending law school.[8]

After law school, he clerked for Justice Richard B. Sanders of the Washington Supreme Court from 2005 to 2006 and Judge Andrew J. Kleinfeld of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit from 2006 to 2007. Following his clerkship, he was an associate at Sullivan & Cromwell until 2010, when he accepted a teaching position at the Hofstra University Maurice A. Deane School of Law.[10] His article on the legal history of the Supreme Court case United States v. Miller, "The Peculiar Story of United States v. Miller" (2008) in the New York University Journal of Law and Liberty, was cited by Justice Antonin Scalia in his landmark majority opinion for the Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller.[11]

Justice John Paul Stevens later credited Frye's work in his final memoirs The Making of a Justice: Reflections on My First 94 Years for changing his approach in Heller.[12]

As a filmmaker and artist, Frye worked with experimental art, found footage, and archival images. He was temporarily a graduate student at New York University and held other positions as a teaching assistant and librarian. His films were presented at Mobile Home in San Francisco, X-Film and Chicago Filmmakers in Chicago, Anthology Film Archives in New York City, Starlight Cinema in Madison, and Eiga Arts in Japan. Some of his films were distributed by the Film-Makers' Cooperative in New York City, where he was employed and served as a board member.[13]

After graduating from law school and working as a legal clerk, Frye worked as an associate at Sullivan & Cromwell from 2007 to 2010. While working, he ran for District Leader for the Manhattan Democrats in the Upper West Side in 2008, an election he lost by "14-8," according to his own admission.[14] From 2010 to 2012 he taught at the Hofstra University School of Law. He and his then-wife, Penny Lane, worked on the film Our Nixon and started a Kickstarter for their work in 2011.[15] Further grants, from Cinereach, the Jerome Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts, and the Tribeca Film Institute Documentary Fund, allowed them to continue their work.[16]

Frye took a tenure-track position as a law professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law in 2012, where he currently is the Spears-Gilbert Associate Professor of Law. In 2013, Our Nixon was released at the 42nd International Film Festival Rotterdam, to wide critical acclaim.[17][18] The film was distributed by CNN on television and theatrically by Cinedigm.

His legal scholarship focuses on issues of intellectual property, legal history, legal norms, concepts of ownership, and art. He is a leading scholar on plagiarism, art, and museum deaccessioning. In addition to his academic publications, he has co-written opinion articles in The Hill and Jurist on legal topics. He hosts a radio show on WUKY and a podcast interviewing other social science scholars, Ipse Dixit.[19] The podcast received some attention from The New York Times after Justin R. Walker, of interest to the Times as a nominee to become a federal judge, appeared on it and discussed the role of the Federalist Society in the legal profession.[20][21]

He advocates a radical conception of property ownership and academic citation, actively endorsing plagiarism. On his SSRN page, he sanctions plagiarism and copying of his work, stating: "All of my articles are licensed CC0/public domain. Please feel free to use them in any way that you like. I specifically authorize you to plagiarize my articles."[22] He has published an article entirely written by an essay mill company,[23] discussed his ideas on the podcasts The Legal Impact and Elucidations,[24][25] and his work on plagiarism has been referenced by philosopher Agnes Callard in The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Point.[26][27] In one of his articles, he re-attributed all of his written scholarship to any person who requested one of his works.[28]

Frye has been married three times. His most recent marriage, to criminal law scholar and fellow law professor Maybell Romero, attracted public and scholarly attention. Both were married to other people and seeking divorce at the time of Frye's proposal, which appeared in the abstract to their co-written article "The Right to Unmarry" (2020) in the Cleveland State Law Review:[29]

This is a marriage proposal in the form of a law review article. In this Article, I observe that Maybell Romero and I are in love. I want to marry her, and I believe she wants to marry me. At least I'll find out pretty soon. But we cannot marry each other right now, because we are both currently married to other people.

This proposal led to numerous tweets and commentaries on the Volokh Conspiracy law blog,[30] Lawrence Solum's Legal Theory Blog,[31] The Faculty Lounge,[32] and Second Thoughts Blog of the Center for Firearms Law at Duke University.[33] Romero accepted Frye's proposal, but both still had to wait for the dissolution of their previous marriages, a process lengthened by the COVID-19 pandemic. Both were eventually granted divorces from their respective marriages and married "on October 10, 2020 at 4:00 PM at the Gene Snyder Federal Courthouse" under Judge Justin R. Walker, "within about 24 hours of Brian's divorce finally getting finalized."[29]

• Appearances on C-SPAN