About
Luke M. Milligan divides his time between Hungary, Italy, and the United States, spending parts of each fall and spring on UofL’s campus, where he's a tenured professor at the university’s law school. He teaches Jurisprudence, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, and a seminar on Natural Law and Natural Rights.
Milligan is the Director of the Ordered Liberty Program (OLP). OLP governs a range of university initiatives, including the Ordered Liberty School in Central Europe, based in Hungary at the Ludovika University of Public Service in Budapest. It oversees a core academic curriculum, a law fellowship program, a speaker series, and international academic conferences. Milligan is a co-founder of OLP, along with Professor Justin Walker, now Judge of the D.C. Circuit.
Milligan practiced law with Williams & Connolly in Washington, D.C., representing clients around the world in regulatory, civil, and white-collar criminal matters. An internationally recognized expert on government searches and seizures, Milligan left Williams & Connolly to be a law professor in Kentucky, where he represented U.S. Senator Rand Paul as lead amicus counsel in landmark separation-of-powers litigation, stripping the Governor of Kentucky of inherent emergency authority under the constitution and, in turn, ending all statewide Covid-19 curfews, capacity limits, and mask mandates. He is the author of dozens of articles and book chapters on constitutional law and legal theory, centered in the main on the idea of a “right to be secure.” Milligan has been a visiting professor at the University of Milan’s Department of Italian and Supranational Public Law, and a visiting scholar on law faculties in Finland, Germany, Japan, Portugal, and South Africa. He served as clerk to Judge Edith Brown Clement of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and Judge Martin L.C. Feldman of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana. He was articles editor of the law review at Emory and, years later, a visiting law professor, teaching the English common law of habeas corpus. Milligan sits on the Board of Advisors of the Cato Supreme Court Review in Washington, D.C., the scientific committee of the CERIDAP editorial series in Milan, Italy, and the Board of Editors of the Public Governance, Administration and Finances Law Review in Budapest, Hungary, a peer-reviewed journal focused on constitutional developments within the Visegrad Group (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia).
He’s been named Professor of the Year by law school alumni and Hooding Professor by four graduating law school classes.
