Myles V. Lynk, a graduate of Harvard Law School, is the Robert W. Foster Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at the University of South Carolina School of Law and the Peter Kiewit Foundation Professor emeritus of Law and the Legal Profession at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, Arizona State University (“ASU”). He specializes in civil procedure and legal ethics. Prior to joining the academy, Professor Lynk was a partner in the Washington, DC, office of a large national law firm, served on the White House Domestic Policy Staff in the Carter Administration and was a law clerk to Judge Damon J. Keith of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. From Sept. 2019 to Dec. 2022 Professor Lynk served as the Senior Assistant Disciplinary Counsel for appellate litigation in the District of Columbia Courts’ Office of Disciplinary Counsel.

At ASU Professor Lynk also served as a Faculty Fellow at Barrett, the undergraduate Honors College, and as a Senior Fellow in the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics (where his research focused on the tension between a lawyer’s ethical duties to clients, personal self-interest and responsibilities to the public). From 2004 through 2010, Professor Lynk served as ASU’s Faculty Athletics Representative to the NCAA and Pac-10 (now Pac-12) Conference, responsible for certifying the academic eligibility of ASU’s intercollegiate student-athletes. In 2005, ASU’s President tasked Professor Lynk with leading the university’s investigation into the shooting death of a graduate student by an undergraduate student-athlete. This resulted in the “Lynk Report,” which recommended numerous changes to improve campus safety at ASU that have since been implemented. In April 2007, in an unprecedented step, Professor Lynk and the ASU Women’s Basketball Head Coach published a letter in The Arizona Republic which was co-signed by over 60 ASU faculty, coaches, and administrators, in support of the Rutgers University Women’s Basketball team whose Black players had been insulted by a radio talk show host.

Professor Lynk’s teaching, and research are informed by his professional service. He is a past President of the District of Columbia Bar.  In 1998 was appointed by then Chief Justice of the United States William Rehnquist to the first of two terms on the Civil Rules Advisory Committee of the United States Judicial Conference and chaired the Advisory Committee’s Discovery Rules Subcommittee.  In summer 2004 Professor Lynk was a Fellow on U.S. Senator John Kyl’s Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Homeland Security of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. Professor Lynk served as a member of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University’s Advisory Commission on Addiction Treatment and in 2017-18 served pro bono as the legal ethics consultant to the District of Columbia Office of Attorney General.

Professor Lynk is a member of the American Law Institute and served on its governing Council. In the American Bar Association (“ABA”), Professor Lynk served on the Board of Governors; chaired the ABA’s Section of Individual Rights & Responsibilities (now the Section of Civil Rights and Social Justice) where he focused on the legal issues surrounding income inequality and poverty in the US. He was a co-founder and initial chair of the Committee on Community Economic Development of the ABA’s Business Law Section; chaired the Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility (where he worked to add discrimination and sexual harassment to the Model Rules of Professional Conduct as forms of professional misconduct), the Standing Committee on Professional Discipline (where he sought to add safeguards in the Model Judicial Code to protect the independence of elected judges) and the Special Committee on Bioethics and the Law (where he helped organize the 2001 conference at Tuskegee University on bioethics, minorities and the law). In 2015 Professor Lynk participated in the deliberations that resulted in, and was one of the fifteen signatories to, the Joint Statement on Eliminating Bias in the Criminal Justice System of the American Bar Association and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.    

Professor Lynk has held visiting professorships at Duke University and George Washington University and taught at the Georgetown University Law Center and the Howard University School of Law. In 2014 Professor Lynk was a Visiting Fellow at Magdalene College, University of Cambridge, England, and a Visitor to the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge; his research focused on a comparative analysis of the differences between the UK and the US in their regulation of the legal profession. His public lecture to the Cambridge Faculty of Law was on the evolution of the doctrine of judicial review in the U.S. Supreme Court of Acts of Congress, from its discussion in The Federalist No. 78, to its initial application in Marbury v. Madison, to its use by the Supreme Court today. Professor Lynk has lectured widely on legal ethics and professional responsibility, including at the U.S. Naval Justice School, the Arizona Office of Attorney General, the Ethics Summit of the National Attorneys General Training and Research Institute, the International Conference of Legal Regulators, the National Organization of Bar Counsel, the Bar Services Board of England and Wales, and the Judicial Conference of the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Professor Lynk was a founder and President of the Frederick B Abramson Foundation (now the Abramson Scholarship Foundation) in Washington, DC, and has served on the Board of Directors of the Council on Legal Education Opportunity and the Sandra Day O’Connor Institute for American Democracy. In 2010, Professor Lynk received the ASU College of Law Alumni Association’s Faculty of the Year Award. He also is a recipient of the ABA’s Spirit of Excellence Award and Father Robert F. Drinan Award, of ASU’s Excellence in Diversity Award, of the Arizona Black Bar’s Excellence in Diversity Award, and  the State Bar of Arizona’s Award for Service to the Legal Profession.