National Advisory Council: 2023
Brady Williamson is a constitutional and corporate litigator who taught periodically at the University of Wisconsin Law School for more than three decades. He has successfully represented clients in the U.S. Supreme Court, and he often has appeared in the federal and state appellate courts on constitutional issues. Beginning in October 2017, he has served as the court-appointed fee examiner in the $120 billion PROMESA reorganization proceedings for the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.
He has long been involved in constitutional and election law projects in West Africa, Iraq, Southern Sudan, Egypt and Bangladesh, traveling there to work with the committees drafting new national and regional constitutions. His pro bono constitutional work has been sponsored, by the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, a nonprofit organization working to strengthen democracy world-wide.
In the United States, Brady’s legal practice also focuses on appellate advocacy and corporate law and reorganization. He has argued and won a U.S. Supreme Court case that addressed the relationship between federal and state law, and he has litigated a wide range of Equal Protection, Due Process and First Amendment cases including several national media defamation cases in 2020-2022.
Brady is a member of the National Bankruptcy Conference, whose membership is limited to academics, judges, and practitioners with a focus on bankruptcy law. He is also a member of the American Bankruptcy Institute and the American College of Bankruptcy and, beginning in 2020, a contributing editor to Collier on Bankruptcy, the leading bankruptcy treatise. He has served on several public advisory committees to help evaluate federal judicial nominees. In 1996, Brady was appointed by the President of the United States to chair the National Bankruptcy Review Commission, which submitted its comprehensive recommendations to Congress, the Chief Justice and the President.
In 2009, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York appointed him an examiner in the General Motors reorganization cases. Since then, the firm and Brady also have served as counsel to the Fee Committee in the Lehman Brothers Chapter 11 proceedings and the Fee Committee in the Energy Future Holdings Corp. proceedings, along with more recent cases in Delaware as well as the unique proceedings involving Puerto Rico.
Apart from his work at Godfrey & Kahn, Brady led the negotiation team for the 2020 Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates in Cleveland, Salt Lake City, and Nashville, representing the Democratic candidates in developing the debate format, Covid-protocols, and logistics with the Commission on Presidential Debates, the host universities and institutions, and the opposing campaign.