Mario Williams
President
Mario Williams has dedicated his life to advocating and litigating issues that promote stronger respect for the rights of all people, including the right to self-respect and dignity. He has undertaken this life-long pursuit both here in the United States and throughout the Americas Region, including Central and South America.
After graduating with honors from Morehouse College, Mr. Williams worked as an Environmental Careers Organization intern with the Region IV, EPA office in Atlanta, working on superfund site issues. After that, Mr. Williams served as a Peace Corps volunteer for nearly three years in Honduras, Central America, where he designed and helped build down-flow-gravity water systems with (and for) indigenous rural communities. In all, Mr. Williams has over ten years of experience working in Latin America (living in both Honduras and Chile, South America), successfully petitioning, for example, the Inter-America Commission on Human Rights on behalf of Spanish-speaking peoples.
In the United States, Mr. Williams’s work in the area of constitutional/civil rights law has been extensive, especially in the litigation areas of prison, police misconduct, and employment, amongst other areas (view a sample of case results here). In this respect, Mr. Williams has stated, “For each client, I try to achieve what is best for him/her, while also achieving system-wide change, so that my client knows that we are fighting for him or her, along with fighting for all those persons who have (and will face) the same unlawful conduct.”
Mr. Williams has also served as a City Council member for the City of Clarkston, GA, a city that has been named the “Ellis Island” of the United States because of its diversity amongst residents from around the world. While on City Council, Mr. Williams headed the law and legislative committee, playing an integral role in passing legislation such as “ban the box,” a law that prohibited the City government from asking about criminal history on its employment applications, while also going a step further than other cities by providing incentives to private sector companies, seeking contract work with the city, who also implemented the “ban-the-box program.” Mr. Williams also pushed through the “decriminalization” of marijuana for the City, a piece of legislation that has been used around the State of Georgia as a model for such efforts.
In sum, Mr. Williams has always pursued life experiences in the areas of human rights, constitutional law, city councilman work, opponent research for distinguished persons such as former Congressman John Lewis and multiple state senators and elected Mayors, and commercial litigation, to provide a well-rounded, effective approach to obtaining results that his clients both desire and deserve.
Mr. Williams attended Lewis and Clark Law School in Portland, OR, where he won several academic awards as well as being elected as a student body representative by his peers.
Education
- Morehouse College B.A. Political Science
- Lewis and Clark Law School
Jurisdictions Admitted to Practice
- Admitted to States of Georgia, Virginia, and New York
- U.S Supreme Court
- Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals
- Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals
- Numerous District Courts