Emmet Bondurant

Emmet Bondurant is a nationally recognized trial lawyer with more than 50 years of experience representing both plaintiffs and defendants. Emmet’s career has included a strong commitment to community service and pro bono litigation, including death penalty, habeas corpus, reapportionment, and other civil rights and constitutional cases, including representation of Guantanamo detainees. He has served as President and a Director of the Atlanta Legal Aid Society, President of the University of Georgia Law School Alumni Association, Chairman and a member of the board of the Georgia Resource Center, a Trustee of the American Inns of Court Foundation, a member of the board of Gideon’s Promise and is currently a member of the National Governing Board of Common Cause. He also served as chair of the Atlanta Charter Commission, a successful two-year effort to completely rewrite the 100-year old Atlanta City Charter. Emmet has had a career long commitment to democracy issues and indigent defense. In 1964, when Emmet was 26, he successfully argued Wesberry v. Sanders, which held for the first time that congressional districts throughout the United States must contain equal populations (the one-person-one-vote rule). He was also the youngest member of a team of lawyers in Toombs v. Fortson that forced Georgia legislature to comply with the Equal Protection Clause by reapportioning both state senate and house districts to comply with the one-person-one-vote rule. In 1966, he argued (unsuccessfully) Fortson v. Morris, in which the Supreme Court rejected, 5-4, a challenge to an 1824 provision of the Georgia Constitution that required the Governor of Georgia to be elected by a malapportioned state legislature rather than by a vote of the people in a run-off election, after Lester Maddox and Howard Bo Callaway failed to receive a majority of the vote in the 1966 general election. Emmet is currently serving as lead counsel in Common Cause v. Rucho (appeal pending), the first case in which a federal court has declared a partisan gerrymander of congressional districts violates the U.S. Constitution. Emmet also successfully represented Elizabeth Hishon, the plaintiff in Hishon v. King & Spalding, in which the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that law firms are subject to Title VII and prohibited from discriminating against women in the selection of partners. Emmet is also a leader in the fight to reform the indigent defense system beginning as a young lawyer in 1964, and culminating in 2003 with the passage of the Indigent Defense Act, which created for the first time a uniform state-wide indigent defense system under the supervision of the Georgia Public Defender Standards Council, of which he was elected and served as its first chairman from 2003-2007. Emmet and the firm also represented Gary X. Nelson, who was held on Georgia’s death row for over twelve years before his conviction was set aside and he was ordered released by the Georgia Supreme Court in 1991. University of Georgia School of Law, LL.B., 1960, magna cum laude University of Georgia, A.B., 1958, cum laude Harvard Law School, LL.M., 1962