Myles Lynk

Myles V. Lynk is the 2025 recipient of the American Bar Association's ("ABA's") Michael Franck Professional Responsibility Award. This is the ABA's highest honor to a law professor or lawyer for excellence in legal ethics and professional responsibility.  Also in 2025, Professor Lynk received the American Bar Foundation's Outstanding Service Award, in recognition of his career of service to the public and the legal profession.   

Professor Lynk is the Dean of Arizona State University's ("ASU's") Emeritus College. He is an Emeritus Professor of Law at ASU's Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, where he was the first Peter Kiewit Foundation Professor of Law and the Legal Profession, specializing in civil procedure, professional responsibility and business organizations. In addition, at the law school and at ASU’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute and Barrett, the Honors College, Professor Lynk has taught seminars on the tension between social responsibility and personal autonomy in "The Iliad of Homer."

Professor Lynk came to ASU in 2000 as the Distinguished Visiting Scholar from Practice. Prior to coming to ASU, he was a partner in the Washington, D.C. 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 U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. He is a past president of the District of Columbia Bar and, after taking emeritus status here at ASU, Professor Lynk served from 2019 through 2022 as the Senior Assistant Disciplinary Counsel in charge of appellate litigation in the District of Columbia Courts’ Office of Disciplinary Counsel. 

In the Spring 2023 academic semester, Professor Lynk held the Robert W. Foster Distinguished Visiting Professorship at the University of South Carolina Joseph F. Rice School of Law, where he taught 1L civil procedure, an upper-level seminar on advanced professional responsibility, and organized and keynoted the South Carolina Law Review’s symposium on the future of legal ethics and professional regulation. In the Fall 2023 academic semester, Professor Lynk was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Michigan State University College of Law, where he taught professional responsibility and delivered two public lectures on the use of racial and ethnic imagery in the United States in advertising and by sports teams. He also has held a visiting professorship at the Duke University School of Law in 2010. In 2024 Professor Lynk returned to the ASU Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law where he teaches professional responsibility.

During his tenure as a member of the College of Law’s full-time faculty, Professor Lynk also held appointments as an Honors Faculty Fellow in Barrett, the Honors College; as Scholar-in-Residence at the ASU Center for the Study of Race and Democracy; 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); and as a sustainability scientist in the ASU Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation. In 2009, Professor Lynk delivered the Donohoe Forum lectures of the Arizona Ecumenical Council on the ethical challenges presented by the Great Recession of 2008-09. He has held other visiting professorships in law at Duke University and George Washington University. 

Professor Lynk also served the College of Law as the Dean’s Designee for student disciplinary matters, as a faculty advisor to numerous student organizations including the Christian Legal Society, the John P. Morris Black Law Students Association, and the ASU Sports and Entertainment Law Journal.  He also initiated the creation of the ASU Corporate and Business Law Journal.

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, where his research focused on a comparative analysis of the differences in theory and practice of how the legal profession is regulated in the United Kingdom and the United States. His public lecture to the University of Cambridge Cambridge Faculty of Law was on the evolution of the doctrine of judicial review of legislation by the U.S. Supreme Court, 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's teaching and research are informed by his service to public and the legal profession.  He has lectured widely on legal ethics and professional discipline, including to Navy and Marine Corps JAG officers at the U.S. Naval Justice School, 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 in the United Kingdom, and the Judicial Conference of the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He was a panelist at the 2005 Transatlantic Corporate Governance Dialogue and the 2015 Northwestern University Securities Regulation Institute. He was appointed by then Chief Justice of the United States William Rehnquist to two terms on the Civil Rules Advisory Committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States and chaired the Advisory Committee’s Discovery Rules Subcommittee. In 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 Advisory Commission on Addiction Treatment of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. The Commission’s Report, "Addiction Medicine: Closing the Gap Between Science and Medicine," was published in June 2012. From 2017 to 2019 he served pro bono as the legal ethics consultant to the District of Columbia Office of Attorney General.

In the American Bar Association Professor Lynk chaired the ABA’s Section of Civil Rights and Social Justice (where he focused on the legal issues surrounding income inequality and poverty in the US); was a co-founder and initial chair of the Committee on Community Economic Development of the ABA’s Business Law Section; and chaired the ABA's Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility (where he worked successfully to add discrimination and sexual harassment by lawyers in the course of their professional activities to the Model Rules of Professional Conduct as forms of professional misconduct).  Professor Lynk Also chaired the ABA's Standing Committee on Professional Discipline (where he sought to add safeguards in the Model Code of Judicial Conduct to protect the independence of elected judges) and the ABA's Special Committee on Bioethics and the Law (where he helped organize the 2001 conference at Tuskegee University on bioethics, minorities and the law. He served for many years on the U.S. Indian Health Service’s Phoenix- area Institutional Review Board (IRB) which monitors human subjects research in American Indian communities in Arizona, Nevada and Utah, and helped revise this IRB’s Procedural Guidelines). In 2015, Professor Lynk participated in the deliberations that resulted in -- and was one of the 15 signatories to -- the Joint Statement of the ABA  and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., on Eliminating Bias in the Criminal Justice System. In 2018, Professor Lynk brought the annual Ethics Summit of the Center for Ethics and Public Integrity of the National Association of Attorneys General to the ASU College of Law. This was the first time this event, attended by attorneys from all over the United States, was held at a law school and law students were able to attend some of the sessions.

Professor Lynk's service to ASU is extensive. From 2004 to 2010 at the behest of ASU President Michael Crow as ASU’s NCAA Faculty Athletics Representative, responsible for certifying the academic eligibility of ASU’s intercollegiate student-athletes. In 2005, President Crow 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 so-called "Lynk Report" (formally titled, "An Investigation into Issues Raised by the Tragedy of March 26, 2005, Including Recommended Changes in University Policy and Procedures” (July 2005). The Report recommended numerous changes to improve campus safety at ASU that were implemented by the university administration. In April 2007, Professor Lynk and ASU Women’s Basketball Head Coach Charli Turner Thorne published a letter in the Arizona Republic which was co-signed by more than 60 ASU faculty, coaches and administrators, in support of the Rutgers University Women’s Basketball team, whose Black players had been referred to in racially derogatory terms by a radio talk show host.

In addition, Professor Lynk has served ASU as a member of the ASU President’s Academic Council, as a member of two Provost’s Regents Professor Nomination Committees and, most recently, as a member of a President’s Professor Advisory Panel. In 2015, Professor Lynk was an advisor to the University Faculty Senate President on the revisions to ASU’s academic policy ACD 402, which addresses personal relationships between faculty and students. 

As a part of his service to the public nd the profession, Professor Lynk has served on the Board of Directors of the Sandra Day O’Connor Institute for American Democracy, the Board of Governors of the American Bar Association, the governing Council of the American Law Institute, and on the Chandler, Arizona, Human Relations Commission. In 2010, Professor Lynk was the recipient of the Faculty of the Year Award from the ASU College of Law Alumni Association. He also is a recipient of the ABA’s Spirit of Excellence Award, the ABA's Father Robert F. Drinan Award, ASU’s Excellence in Diversity Award, the Arizona Black Bar Association’s Excellence in Diversity Award, and the State Bar of Arizona’s Award for Service to the Legal Profession.