Advocates International (AI) was founded in 1992 by Sam Ericsson, Harvard Law School graduate and former Executive Director of Christian Legal Society in the 1980s. AI’s story begins with the collapse of communism in 1989 when Sam and then Campbell University Professor Lynn Buzzard met with key leadership in the Soviet Union to discuss and introduce justice and moral values to the system.  These series of meetings led Sam to establish an organization with a global scope that would focus on encouraging local Christian lawyers to organize nationally, regionally, and globally and become active in the public square on legal and ethical issues facing the Church and society.  Before its inception, there were only ten national lawyer groups.  After its creation, AI consisted of about 100 national lawyer groups that today meet nationally, regionally, and globally.

Today AI’s lawyers, law students, and judges, or “Advocates” as they are known, meet with the vision to bear witness of Jesus Christ through their profession. They are trained and mentored in doing justice with compassion and challenged to put legs to the final words of Jesus, as recorded in Acts 1:8, by implementing the L-O-R-D Strategy: [L] meeting locally; [O] organizing nationally; [R] networking regionally; and [D] making disciples globally to promote religious freedom & human rights, the sanctity of human life, the family & community, peace & reconciliation, and the rule of law with integrity.