Michael B. Waitzkin

Michael (Buz) Waitzkin’s varied legal career has taken him through the criminal and civil courts to the White House counsel’s office and the classrooms and boardrooms of the nation’s premier universities.

Michael B. Waitzkin graduated from the University of Virginia (BA 1971, Echols Scholar, Phi Beta Kappa), where he studied government and political philosophy. He received his law degree from Stanford University (JD 1974) and was a Fellow in Law, Science and Medicine at Yale Law School (LLM 1975).

He began his legal career at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, where he represented indigent criminal defendants in trial and appellate proceedings and served as Chief of the Trial Division. He worked for Sen. Edward Kennedy is his 1980 presidential campaign and has worked on numerous campaigns since that time. He entered private practice in 1981 and has extensive litigation experience in trial and appellate courts throughout the country, as well as before administrative agencies and in congressional inquiries.

He served as Special Counsel to the President in the White House Counsel’s Office (1997-98), where his principal responsibilities included management of numerous congressional and grand jury inquiries.

For the past decade, his practice has primarily focused on providing strategic counsel to the biomedical research community, including academics, government officials, private companies and non-profits. He has regularly lectured and taught at universities and professional training programs throughout the country.

He is a Senior Fellow in the Health Sector Management Program at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business. He has served on numerous non-profit and public boards, including the Board of Visitors of the Sanford Institute of Public Policy at Duke. He is currently on the Board of Visitors at Stanford Law School, where he serves on the Law, Science and Technology Advisory Board. He is the principal at Catawba Consulting.