William Bennett Turner

WILLIAM BENNETT TURNER

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

I practiced law for 45 years. I specialized in unusual litigation, including constitutional law. I argued three cases before the United States Supreme Court (including two First Amendment cases) and more than 40 cases in lower appellate 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.

I have published dozens of articles in various magazines, newspapers, online sites, and law reviews. My work has appeared in the New York Times, Politico, USA Today, Wired, the San Francisco Chronicle, Harvard Magazine, Medium, The Berkeley Blog and many others. I also 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.

Besides Free Speech for Some (updated edition 2020), I am the author of Figures of Speech: First Amendment Heroes and Villains (Berrett-Koehler 2011), which sums up much of what I learned doing and teaching First Amendment cases, and of Free Speech: Supreme Court Opinions from the Beginning to the Roberts Court (Cognella 2019).

There's a lot more on my web site, www.williambturner.com.