Visiting Professor Brings Years of Ethical Training to College of Law
Professor Lynk speaking during Foundations Week.
Professor Myles Lynk at one time thought he’d like to be a doctor. Until the time he didn’t. He explains that turning point was as a college student when he traveled to Uganda to volunteer at the Ngora Hospital for the Harvard Africa Volunteer Project.
“I thought about medicine as a career,” he said. “But after observing a surgical procedure at the hospital with all of the blood swirling around the incision, I decided that a profession with a little less hands-on gore might be right for me. I was attracted to the law because I wanted a profession that was intellectually stimulating, emotionally rewarding, and where you could have a direct and positive impact on peoples’ lives.” It turned out to be the right decision on many levels.
Professor Lynk brings his skills and knowledge to MSU College of Law as a Visiting Professor this semester, teaching Professional Responsibility, offering a seminar on Responsible Lawyering to Second-and-Third-Year students, and supervising directed studies for Second-and-Third-Year students. Prior to MSU, his long and distinguished career as an educator included his appointment as the first Peter Kiewit Foundation Professor of Law and the Legal Profession at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, where he specialized in civil procedure, legal ethics, and business organizations.
He earned his Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School and established a distinguished career in several areas of the law. After serving in public policy in the Carter Administration, first as a Special Assistant to the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, and then as an Assistant Director on the White House Domestic Policy Staff, Professor Lynk was in private practice as a partner in the Washington, D.C., office of Dewey Ballantine LLP. While in private practice, Professor Lynk was elected President of the District of Columbia Bar and was appointed by the Chief Justice of the United States, William Rehnquist, to the Civil Rules Advisory Committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States.
Professor Lynk also has been active in the American Bar Association, having served on the Board of Governors, as Chair of the Section of Civil Rights and Social Justice, and as Chair of both the Standing Committee on Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility and the Standing Committee on Professional Regulation. From 2019 until January 2023, Professor Lynk served in the District of Columbia Office of Disciplinary Counsel as the Senior Assistant Disciplinary Counsel for appellate litigation.
The subject of lawyer ethics is near and dear to him. He has become one of the legal profession’s experts on ethics and was part of Dean Linda Sheryl Greene’s Dean’s Speakers Series last spring speaking on the lawyer’s professional roles and challenging responsibilities titled, “Ethical Challenges and Professional Success: Public Duties, Private Clients, and Professional Responsibility.”
He recalls a quote from a relentless, respected country lawyer from long ago – Abraham Lincoln – who wrote: “[I]f in your own judgment you cannot be an honest lawyer, resolve to be honest without being a lawyer. Choose some other occupation[.]” He sees American lawyers as having three roles: As a representative of clients, an officer of the legal system, and a public citizen having special responsibility for the quality of justice. These roles can lead to conflicts, however, between a lawyer’s fiduciary duty to clients, responsibilities to the legal system, and desire to earn a satisfactory living, while also striving to remain an ethical person. How lawyers address and resolve these conflicts are the issues he seeks to explore in his professional responsibility classes.
Ethics has been a subject area that Professor Lynk has studied and taught for years. He even spoke recently to a gathering of first year students at MSU’s College of Law Foundations Week as well as emphasizing it in a small group gathering later that day. “Being a lawyer is a lot of work,” he said. “A lot of hard work.” Now he brings his message to Michigan State University College of Law for a semester.
Asked why, he smiles. “Dean Linda Greene asked me to come,” he said. “Dean Greene is both a friend, and a widely respected scholar and lawyer, so, of course, I said, Yes. It was not a hard sell. And I am looking forward to my semester here!”