J. Michael Luttig
American lawyer and judge
John Michael Luttig ( LOO-tig; born June 13, 1954) is an American lawyer and jurist who served as a U.S. circuit judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit from 1991 to 2006. Luttig resigned his judgeship in 2006 to become the general counsel of Boeing, a position he held until his retirement in 2019.
An influential conservative legal figure, Luttig gained broader prominence after the presidency of Donald Trump, characterizing him as "a clear and present danger to American democracy," and advocated invoking the Fourteenth Amendment to render Trump ineligible to serve a second term as president.
Luttig is a senior fellow at the Kettering Foundation, an American non-partisan research foundation.
Early life and education
Luttig was born in 1954 in Tyler, Texas. He is a 1976 graduate of Washington and Lee University with a Bachelor of Arts with Omicron Delta Kappa honors. From 1976 to 1978, Luttig worked for the U.S. Supreme Court's Office of the Administrative Assistant to the Chief Justice, where he became close friends with Chief Justice Warren E. Burger. Luttig then attended the University of Virginia School of Law, graduating with a Juris Doctor degree in 1981.
Career
After law school, Luttig spent a year in the Reagan administration as an associate with the White House Counsel, Fred F. Fielding, who hired him on Burger's recommendation. Luttig's duties included reviewing potential judicial appointments and vetting them for ideological consistency with the administration's policies.
The public source identifies “J. Michael Luttig” as american lawyer and judge. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Michael, Luttig and American.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1676364. VIAF identifies the subject as 148178736. The Library of Congress control number is no2010161258. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1954, 1991, 2006 and 2019.
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This entry incorporates text from “J. Michael Luttig” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.