Myles Lynk Elected to Council

At its December meeting in New York the Council elected to its ranks Myles V. Lynk, a former President of the District of Columbia Bar who in 2000 became the first Kiewit Foundation Chair in Law and the Legal Profession at Arizona State University. Professor Lynk, 53, will serve on an interim basis until the 2002 Annual Meeting in May, when his name will be submitted to the membership with the recommendation that he be elected to a regular term.

Born in New York City, Professor Lynk is a graduate of Harvard College and the Harvard Law School, where he was a member of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau. While at Harvard he also served as law clerk to the Honorable Shimon Agranat, President (Chief Justice) of the Supreme Court of Israel, during the 1975 World Peace Through Law Conference Demonstration Trial in Washington, D.C. After graduation he was a law clerk to Judge Damon J. Keith of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Following a brief stint at the firm of Shearman & Sterling in New York City, Professor Lynk joined the Carter Administration, in which he served as a Special Assistant to Secretaries of Health, Education, and Welfare Joseph A. Califano, Jr., and Patricia Roberts Harris, and as an Assistant Director on the White House Domestic Policy Staff. In 1983 he joined the Washington, D.C., office of Dewey Ballantine LLP, concentrating in the areas of corporate transactions and federal-agency litigation. He became a partner in 1985 and practiced extensively in the areas of federal election law and health law. He has published articles for practitioners on federal-election-law compliance and health-care reimbursement for physicians in The Practical Lawyer, The Metropolitan Corporate Counsel, the Journal of Law and Politics, and the Journal of the National Medical Association. A founding member of the District of Columbia Conference on Opportunities for Minorities in the Legal Profession, Professor Lynk was President of the D.C. Bar in 1996-1997 and Chair of the District of Columbia Fellows of the American Bar Foundation from 1997 to 1999. He chaired the Committee on Pro Se Litigation of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and served on the Advisory Committee on Procedure of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The Chief Justice of the United States, William Rehnquist, in 1998 appointed him to the Advisory Committee on Civil Rules of the Judicial Conference of the United States. Professor Lynk was re-appointed last year by the Chief Justice to a second term on the Advisory Committee, where he chairs the subcommittee on electronic discovery.

In 1999 Professor Lynk, who previously had been a Visiting Professor at The George Washington University Law School and a Lecturer in Law at the University of Maryland, left Washington to become the Distinguished Visiting Scholar from Practice at the Colleges of both Law and Business at Arizona State. The following year he accepted an invitation to occupy the tenured Kiewit Foundation Chair in Tempe and to become a full-time academic. He is presently teaching courses in Business Associations, Administrative Law, Professional Responsibility, and Civil Procedure and is engaged in research on corporate governance, business litigation, and the changing nature of legal practice in the 21st century.

Although newly arrived in Arizona, Professor Lynk has already been named Co-Chair of the Task Force on Multi-jurisdictional Practice of the Arizona State Bar and has served on the Arizona State Bar’s Task Force on the Future of the Profession.

A member of the ALI since 1991, Professor Lynk also continues to be active in the ABA. He is currently a Business Law Section delegate to the ABA’s House of Delegates, Chair of the ABA’s Special Committee on Bioethics and the Law, and Co-Chair both of the Committee on Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity of the ABA’s Section of Individual Rights and Responsibility and of the Committee on Community Economic Development of the Section of Business Law.