Luke M. Milligan is a tenured law professor, defense lawyer, and university administrator in the U.S. and Europe.

An internationally recognized scholar of public law and legal theory, Professor Milligan began his career in Washington, D.C., as a white-collar criminal defense attorney with Williams & Connolly.  He served as law clerk to the late Hon. Martin L.C. Feldman of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana and the Hon. Edith Brown Clement of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

Professor Milligan’s research on public institutions identifies, traces, and substantiates the need “to be secure” as a threshold value of constitutional meaning and interpretation.  His “secure theory” of public order serves as the conceptual foundation of a litigation and research center at one of the world’s top public interest law firms, the Institute for Justice.

Milligan has been a visiting professor in Italy at the University of Milan, in Germany at the University of Mainz, in Finland at the University of Turku, in Japan at Kagawa University, in Portugal at the University of Lisbon, and in the U.S. at Emory University.  He sits on the Board of Advisors of the Cato Supreme Court Review in Washington, D.C., and the Board of Editors of the Public Governance, Administration, and Finances Law Review in Budapest, Hungary.

Professor Milligan is the co-founder of the Ordered Liberty Program (OLP), along with Professor Walker, now of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.  OLP is a university academic program dedicated to the advanced study of interpretation, natural law, freedom, and order.  Milligan leads OLP from Budapest, Hungary, where at the Ludovika University he serves as Director of the Ordered Liberty School in Central Europe.  Enrolling PhD and law students from around the world, OLP offers a curriculum focused on legal and political order, with courses on Natural Law & Natural Rights, Executive Authority, Speech Regulation, Comparative Constitutional Law, Constitutional Framing, and European Influences on the American Founding.  The faculty is comprised of U.S. circuit judges and distinguished academics from Europe and the U.S.

In addition, Milligan holds a tenured faculty position in the U.S. at the University of Louisville’s Brandeis School of Law, where he’s a Professor of Law and for parts of the fall and spring teaches Jurisprudence, Criminal Law, and Criminal Procedure, as well as seminars on Natural Rights, Ordered Liberty, and Law & Postmodernism.  An early public critic of the 2010s-era surge of ideological conformity in higher education, Milligan has been named Professor of the Year by the law alumni and hooding professor by five graduating law school classes.

During the COVID-19 pandemic period, Milligan successfully fought the government mandates in the U.S.  He represented U.S. Senator Rand Paul as lead counsel in landmark separation-of-powers litigation against the Governor of Kentucky, Andy Beshear, stripping the state’s executive branch of “inherent constitutional authority” and ending all statewide COVID-19 mandates.

Before attending law school at Emory he lived and worked in Primrose Hill in London, England.  He and his wife, Sarah, have three sons, John, Mark, and Luke, Jr.  An eighth-generation Ohioan, he studied Economics at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and keeps an office in Central Ohio, dividing time between there, the university, and Budapest, Hungary.

Ordered Liberty Program (OLP) Information