Mike Godwin is an attorney and author. A former distinguished senior fellow with the R Street Institute, his work focuses on the areas of patent and copyright reform, surveillance reform, technology policy, freedom of expression and global internet policy.
He has served as a senior policy advisor at Internews, advising the organization’s public-policy partners in developing and transitional democracies, as part of the Global Internet Policy Project. He has also served as general counsel for the California-based Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia and other collaborative projects.
Godwin received his undergraduate and law degrees at the University of Texas at Austin where, while a law student, he served as a reporter and later editor-in-chief of The Daily Texan. Godwin began his legal career as the first staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. His continuing career as an Internet-law thought leader has included a policy fellowship at the Center for Democracy and Technology and a research fellowship at Yale Law School. He has been a contributing editor at Reason magazine since 1994 and is the originator of the widely cited “Godwin’s Law of Nazi Analogies,” which in 2012 was added to the Oxford English Dictionary.