John J. Buckley, Jr.

Senior Counsel with Williams & Connolly LLP, John 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 (co-arbitrator and chair) as well as counsel in arbitrations. John has extensive experience as lead trial counsel in civil cases and arbitral proceedings and was elected a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers.

John’s experience in arbitration and litigation spans a wide range of industries and issues, including:

- energy, oil & gas (refining, gas price review/adjustment, gas gathering, exploration, hedging, oil contracts, electric generation),

- patents (standard-essential patents, FRAND royalty rates, IP licensing),

- technology (telecommunications, medical devices),

- foreign investment (M&A, share purchase, joint venture),

- civil engineering and construction,

- financial transactions, and

- professional liability.

John has been Visiting Clinical Lecturer at Yale Law School (2015-2021), where he taught advocacy in international arbitration. He has consistently been listed  among the top US commercial arbitration practitioners in Euromoney's Guide to the World's Leading Experts in Commercial Arbitration. His arbitrations have involved proceedings under AAA, JAMS, CPR, ICDR, ICC, ICSID, and HKIAC rules and ad hoc arbitrations.

John is listed on numerous arbitrator rosters, including the American Arbitration Association, its National Energy Panel, CPR International Institute for Conflict Prevention & Resolution's Panel of Distinguished Neutrals, its Natioal Panel, its  General Commercial Panel of arbitrators for Washington, DC, its International/Cross Border Panel of arbitrators, and its Energy, Oil and Gas Panel of arbitrators. He is also listed on the panel of arbitrators of the AAA’s International Centre for Dispute Resolution (ICDR) – International Panel of Arbitrators; International Arbitration Institute of Paris (IAI); the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators (FCIArb); and The Roster of International Arbitrators, Juris, Second Edition.

John is a member of the Advisory Council and the Arbitration Committee of the CPR International Institute for Conflict Prevention & Resolution; he co-chairs CPR’s Rules Revision Committee.  He is also a member of 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. He is frequently an invited speaker at arbitration conferences.

John earned his AB, magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from Georgetown University and his JD, 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 US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and for Associate US Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. John later joined the US Department of Justice where he served as special assistant to US 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.