Jason Williamson
Jason D. Williamson is executive director of the Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law at NYU School of Law. Prior to assuming his current role in June 2021, Jason spent more than ten years as a staff attorney and deputy director with the ACLU’s Criminal Law Reform Project, where he focused primarily on Fourth Amendment, police practices, and public defense reform litigation. Prior to joining the ACLU, Jason worked as a litigation associate at the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP in New York, and served as a law clerk for Judge Sterling Johnson, Jr. in the Eastern District of New York from 2007-2008. He began his legal career in New Orleans in the months following Hurricane Katrina, first as a staff attorney for the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, and later as a staff attorney and founding member of Juvenile Regional Services (now called the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights), which provides legal representation for indigent youth in Orleans Parish Juvenile Court. Jason also serves as an adjunct clinical professor at New York University School of Law. He received his Bachelor Degree from Harvard University in 1998, his M.A. from University of Chicago in 1999, and his J.D. from NYU Law in 2006. Jason is a devout Rastafarian, loving husband, and proud father of fourteen-year-old twin daughters.