John Michael Luttig ( ; 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 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.
Early life and education
Luttig was born in 1954 in Tyler, Texas. He graduated from Washington and Lee University in 1976 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. After his Supreme Court clerkship, Luttig continued to work for Chief Justice Burger as a special assistant until 1985. Luttig later served as co-executor of Burger's one-page will, which gained notoriety for Burger's failure to dictate how estate taxes should be paid.
In 1985, Luttig entered private practice at the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell. He returned to government service in 1989, holding various positions within the United States Department of Justice until 1991 under President George H. W. Bush, including assistant attorney general in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel. His duties in the Justice Department included assisting Supreme Court nominees David Souter and Clarence Thomas through the nomination and confirmation process, including their Senate confirmation hearings. Luttig's help to Thomas in his highly contested confirmation hearings and their aftermath was somewhat controversial because Luttig's own appointment to the federal bench had been approved by the Senate, but he delayed taking the judicial oath of office, presumably because he could not credibly serve as a federal judge, who is supposed to be nonpartisan, while fulfilling the task of ensuring that Thomas got a Supreme Court seat.
Federal judgeship
On April 23, 1991, President George H. W. Bush nominated Luttig to fill a newly created seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on July 26, 1991, and received his commission on August 2, 1991. He became the youngest judge (at age 37) on a federal appeals court at the time of his appointment.
On the bench, Luttig was compared to Justice Antonin Scalia for his analytical rigor and for criticizing his colleagues for inconsistencies or embellishments in their judicial opinions. He was also similar to Scalia in that his judicial philosophy sometimes led to opinions that were at odds with conservative legal orthodoxy. Bush interviewed Luttig, but ultimately did not choose him to fill either of two Supreme Court vacancies in 2005; those two seats were filled by John Roberts and Samuel Alito.
Luttig was among the leading feeder judges on the U.S. court of appeals, with more than 40 of his law clerks going on to clerk with conservative justices on the Supreme Court. Of those, 33 clerked for either Justice Thomas or Justice Scalia. Luttig's clerks have nicknamed themselves "Luttigators".
Father's murder
Luttig's father, John Luttig, was fatally shot in 1994 in a carjacking by Napoleon Beazley, who was a 17-year-old boy. Luttig testified in the sentencing portion of the trial, supporting imposition of the death penalty. Justices Antonin Scalia, David Souter, and Clarence Thomas recused themselves because of past association with Luttig. Scalia recused himself because Luttig had clerked for him; Souter and Thomas recused themselves because Luttig led the George H. W. Bush administration's efforts to win their Senate confirmation. Beazley was one of the last juvenile offenders to be executed in the United States prior to Roper v. Simmons.
Cases
Padilla v. Hanft
In September 2005, Luttig wrote the opinion for a three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit that upheld the government's power to designate José Padilla, the alleged "dirty bomber" who was captured at a Chicago airport, as an "enemy combatant" and to detain him in a military brig without charge. In December, the Bush administration, anticipating a reversal in the Supreme Court, petitioned the Fourth Circuit for approval to transfer Padilla to civilian custody for a criminal trial. The move set off a dispute between the Bush administration and Luttig. Luttig's panel refused to grant the transfer and castigated the government for potentially harming its "credibility before the courts." The government petitioned the Supreme Court to allow the transfer by arguing that the appellate court's refusal encroached on the power of the President. The Supreme Court granted the government's request.
Hamdi v. Rumsfeld
In the case of Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, Luttig disagreed with the majority opinion of his colleagues on the Fourth Circuit and argued that Yaser Esam Hamdi, an American citizen captured in Afghanistan and held as an enemy combatant, deserved "meaningful judicial review" of his case. replacing Douglas Bain. In his resignation letter, Luttig wrote, "Boeing may well be the only company in America for which I would have ever considered leaving the court." He also mentioned his two children's upcoming college education; the position at Boeing paid more than the federal judgeship. At the time of his resignation, federal appellate judges were paid US$175,100 annually. According to Boeing's 2008 Annual Report, Luttig's total compensation for 2008 was $2,798,962. In 2015, Luttig was named the 7th-highest paid general counsel in the United States by Above the Law, with a salary of $4,236,580 (~$ in ).
Luttig resigned as general counsel to Boeing in May 2019, and was replaced by Brett Gerry. Luttig's resignation coincided with the terminations of former CEO Dennis Muilenburg and former Commercial Aircraft Executive Kevin McCallister that year, during the Boeing 737 MAX groundings crisis. In January 2021, he was hired by Coca-Cola Company to be counselor and senior advisor for tax matters.
Role in aftermath of 2020 presidential election
On January 5, 2021, John Eastman, an attorney representing president Donald Trump, and who had clerked for Luttig, met with vice president Mike Pence in the Oval Office to argue that the vice president had the constitutional authority to alter or otherwise change certified electoral votes for the presidential certification in Congress the next day. According to Eastman, he told the vice president that he might have the authority to reject electoral college votes, and he asked the vice president to delay the certification, a proposal which came to be known as the Pence Card. Pence rejected Eastman's argument and instead agreed with Luttig and another conservative scholar, John Yoo, that a vice president has no such constitutional authority. Pence released a letter on January 6 stating he would not attempt to intervene in the certification process, citing Luttig by name, who later said it was "the highest honor of my life" to be involved in preserving the Constitution.
A week later, as preparations were beginning for Donald Trump's second impeachment following the January 6 United States Capitol attack, Luttig argued in a Washington Post op-ed piece that the Constitution did not provide for the impeachment of former presidents. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell later made the same argument while explaining his vote to acquit.
The following year, on June 16, 2022, Luttig testified during a televised hearing conducted by the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack. Before the hearing, Luttig wrote a statement for the record, stating that Trump and his allies "instigated" a war on democracy "so that he could cling to power." He continued, "It is breathtaking that these arguments even were conceived, let alone entertained by the President of the United States at that perilous moment in history" and that January 6 "was the final fateful day for the execution of a well-developed plan by the former president to overturn the 2020 presidential election at any cost." At the close of the hearing, Luttig said:
Luttig co-authored a 69-page report refuting claims of fraud in the 2020 election, published in July 2022.
On August 19, 2023, Luttig and liberal legal scholar Laurence Tribe, published an article that argued that Trump is barred from presidential office pursuant to the Insurrection Clause (section 3 of the 14th Amendment) because of his apparent support for the January 6 United States Capitol attack and, regardless of the riot, "no person who sought to overthrow our Constitution and thereafter declared that it should be 'terminated' and that he be immediately returned to the presidency can in good faith take the oath that Article II, Section 1 demands of any president-elect." This view has been furthered by other legal scholars. Luttig makes the point that