Marvin Ammori

Position / Title: 
Affiliate Scholar

Marvin Ammori is a leading First Amendment lawyer and Internet policy expert. He was instrumental to the adoption of network neutrality rules in the US and abroad–having been perhaps the nation’s leading legal advocate advancing network neutrality–and also instrumental to the defeat of the SOPA and PIPA copyright/censorship bills.

He  is a Legal Fellow with the New America Foundation Open Technology Initiative and an Affiliate Scholar at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet & Society. He also  heads a law firm and consulting practice, the Ammori Group, whose  clients include leading Internet companies and nonprofit organizations. The Ammori Group’s site includes a longer bio and some kind words about his work.

Before starting the Ammori Group, he was a law professor at Nebraska, where he led a program working with U.S. CyberCommand to educate the military’s first generation of “cyberwar” lawyers. His main academic contributions have been in First Amendment theory and doctrine. He left academia to return to Washington, DC, to be a participant again, rather than a spectator, in shaping public policy to advance innovation and free speech.

Before being a law professor, he was a leading advocate for civil liberties and consumer rights as the head lawyer of Free Press. In that capacity, and as the lead lawyer on the seminal Comcast/BitTorrent case, he was perhaps the nation’s leading lawyer on network neutrality, the nation’s most debated Internet policy issue and amongst the nation’s most important recent policy debates. During 2007 and 2008, he was a technology policy advisor to the Obama campaign and to the Presidential Transition.

He  is also a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the Council’s Term Member Advisory Committee. He is an Affiliate Fellow of the Yale Information Society Project, an advisor to the University of Michigan’s Michigan in Washington Program, and collaborates with Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.

He graduated from Harvard Law School, taught on fellowships at Yale and Georgetown law schools, and earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. He loves ice cream.