Judge J. Michael Luttig joins the University of Virginia’s Karsh Institute of Democracy as its first Distinguished Fellow in Law and Democracy, a position sponsored in partnership with the Karsh Center for Law and Democracy at the UVA School of Law. Luttig served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit for 15 years, from 1991 to 2006, having been appointed by former President George H. W. Bush. Luttig is currently counselor and special advisor to the Coca-Cola Company and the board of directors of the Coca-Cola Company. Luttig was executive vice president and general counsel of the Boeing Company from 2006 to 2020. Before that, he served as assistant attorney general at the US Department of Justice and as counselor to the attorney general of the United States. Luttig was assistant counsel to the president at the White House from 1981 to 1982 under former President Ronald Reagan. From 1982 to 1983, he was a law clerk to then-Judge Antonin Scalia of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. From 1983 to 1985, he served as a law clerk and then special assistant to Chief Justice of the United States Warren E. Burger. Luttig earned his bachelor’s degree from Washington and Lee University and his law degree from the University of Virginia.

Kurt Lash is the E. Claiborne Robins Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Richmond where he teaches and writes about constitutional law. Founder and director of the Richmond Program on the American Constitution, Professor Lash has published a number of works on the subjects of constitutional history, theory and law, including The Fourteenth Amendment and the Privileges or Immunities of American Citizenship (Cambridge University Press, 2014), The Lost History of the Ninth Amendment (Oxford University Press, 2009), and The American First Amendment in the Twenty-first Century: Cases and Materials (with William W. Van Alstyne) (5th ed., Foundation Press). In 2021, University of Chicago Press published Prof. Lash’s two-volume collection of original documents relating to the framing and ratification of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Titled “The Reconstruction Amendments: Essential Documents,” the collection is the first of its kind. Prof. Lash is currently working on “A Troubled Birth of Freedom: The Struggle to Amend the Constitution in the Aftermath of the Civil War” (forthcoming, Yale University Press). An elected member of the American Law Institute, Professor Lash also serves on the advisory committee for the Reconstruction Amendments exhibit at the National Constitution Center, and on the advisory committee for the “Quill Project,” a corpus linguistics institute co-sponsored by Oxford University and Utah Valley University. Professor Lash’s work has appeared in numerous legal journals including the Stanford Law Journal, Georgetown Law Journal, Virginia Law Review, and Notre Dame Law Review. He has been a visiting professor at Northwestern University School of Law and is the former director of the University of Illinois College of Law Program in Constitutional Theory, History, and Law.
 

As the founding executive director of the Karsh Institute of Democracy, Melody Barnes guides the organization on an action-oriented path to realizing democracy in principle and practice. Barnes is a dedicated public servant with more than 25 years of experience crafting public policy. She served in the administration of President Barack Obama as assistant to the president and director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. Prior to her work in the Obama administration, Barnes was executive vice president for policy at the Center for American Progress and chief counsel to the late Senator Ted Kennedy on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. Barnes started her career in New York as an associate at Shearman & Sterling. In addition to her role at the Karsh Institute, Barnes is the J. Wilson Newman Professor of Governance at UVA’s Miller Center of Public Affairs, a distinguished fellow at UVA’s School of Law, and co-founder of the domestic-policy strategy firm MB2 Solutions.