Michael Samway is president of The Business and Human Rights Group. He spent ten years at Yahoo! where he was a vice president and deputy general counsel and founded Yahoo!’s Business & Human Rights Program. He previously practiced corporate and securities law at White & Case in the Latin America Practice Group. While studying law, Michael worked in the Antidumping and Countervailing Duty Operations Unit at the U.S. Department of Commerce and in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State.

Michael lectures and writes on business, human rights, and technology topics and has testified before the U.S. Congress on internet freedom. He was a senior lecturer at Duke Law School, is a former visiting scholar at the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University’s Stern School of Business, and has taught as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, where he is former board chair of the MSFS Program.

Samway is a founding board member of the Global Network Initiative and currently serves on the Advisory Network of the Freedom Online Coalition and is a co-lead of the Taskforce on Digital Equality. He formerly served on the Advisory Council of the Center for Democracy & Technology and the Ranking Digital Rights Corporate Accountability Index. He also served for more than ten years on the board, including as chair, of the children’s advocacy organization Foster Care Review.

Michael received BSFS/MSFS degrees from Georgetown University in 1991, was a Fulbright scholar in Chile, and received JD/LLM degrees in comparative and international law from Duke Law School in 1996.