Nabiha Syed

Nabiha has been described as “one of the best emerging free speech lawyers” by Forbes magazine. She is currently the Assistant General Counsel at BuzzFeed, where she handles publication, privacy, and access matters across the globe.

Prior to BuzzFeed, Nabiha was an associate at Levine Sullivan Koch & Schulz, a leading First Amendment law firm, and was named the First Amendment Fellow at The New York Times. She has worked on legal access issues at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; counseled on whether to publish hacked and leaked materials; and advised documentary filmmakers through the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program. She is the co-founder of the Media Freedom and Information Access legal clinic at Yale Law School. She was named as a “40 Under 40 Rising Star” by the New York Law Journal in 2016, and was a finalist for the Outstanding Young Lawyer of the Year Award from the International Bar Association in 2017.

Nabiha is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University, Yale Law School and Oxford University, which she attended as a Marshall Scholar, as well as a non-resident fellow at both Stanford Law School and Yale Law School. At Columbia Journalism School, Nabiha has been adjunct faculty teaching media law to journalism students. She serves as the Vice Chair of the Student Press Law Center, as the Treasurer for Upturn, and on the American Bar Association Communications and Media Law Committee.