John J Buckley Jr Williams & Connolly

John J. Buckley, Jr, Senior Counsel with Williams & Connolly LLP, is the founder and former head of the firm’s international arbitration practice group. A Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators, he serves as arbitrator (chair, co-arbitrator, and sole arbitrator). John has been Visiting Clinical Lecturer at Yale Law School, teaching advocacy in international arbitration.

His experience in commercial and investor-state arbitration spans a wide range of industries and issues, including energy, oil & gas, patents, IP licensing, technology (telecommunications, medical devices), foreign Investment (M&A, share purchase, joint venture), civil engineering and construction, financial services, and professional liability. His arbitrations have involved proceedings under AAA, CPR, ICDR, ICC, ICSID and HKIAC rules as well as ad hoc arbitrations.

He is an arbitrator on the Dispute Settlement Roster of the U.S.–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA) for resolving State-to-State disputes. He is listed on the arbitrator rosters of the American Arbitration Association (AAA), the International Centre for Dispute Resolution (ICDR), the International Institute for Conflict Prevention & Resolution (CPR), the International Arbitration Institute (Paris), and the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators. He is also a member of CPR’s specialty panels for International/Cross Border, Energy, Oil & Gas, and Hedge Fund disputes.

A member of CPR’s Advisory Council and Arbitration Committee, John co-chairs CPR’s Rules Revision Committee and Model Clause Task Force and chairs its Fast Track Rules Committee. He is also a member of the ICC Task Force on ADR and Arbitration, the Advisory Board of the Institute for Transnational Arbitration, the International Arbitration Institute, the International Bar Association’s Arbitration Committee, and the London Court of International Arbitration’s North American Users’ Council.

John earned his A.B., magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from Georgetown University and his J.D., with honors, from The University of Chicago, where he was Editor-in-Chief of The University of Chicago Law Review and elected to the Order of the Coif. After law school, he clerked both for Judge John Minor Wisdom of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and for Associate U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. John later joined the U.S. Department of Justice where he served as special assistant to U.S. Attorney General Edward H. Levi before joining Williams & Connolly, where he was a partner from 1981 to 2018. He is a member of the bars of the District of Columbia and New York and many federal courts, including the Supreme Court of the United States.