Here is some information on him...
From law.com
If Luttig is named to the high court, it won't be just because of his well-placed allies. Friends and detractors agree that Luttig has a sharp and rigorous mind and can build a well-documented case for strongly held, mostly -- but not always -- conservative positions.
"He's a very brilliant person," says Georgetown University Law Center professor Peter Rubin, founder of the liberal American Constitution Society. Rubin also credits Luttig for his open-mindedness, which he saw firsthand when Luttig accepted Rubin's invitation to speak at the ACS 2003 convention. "He was very well received," says Rubin, who adds that "I would be very surprised if he were not very controversial" if nominated.
In his remarks to the liberal group, Luttig attacked judicial activism by both liberal and conservative jurists. "There is no such thing as good or defensible judicial activism," he said. "All activism is in defiance of law -- 'law' that is defined as the politics of the people, not the politics of individual, unelected, life-tenured judges."
In a 2004 speech before Yale University's China Law Center in Beijing, Luttig also said judges of all stripes should welcome searching scrutiny from the public and the press as a beneficial kind of accountability.
"Properly understood," Luttig said, "criticism of the judiciary and the judicial product by a free media is more of a safeguard of, than a threat to, judicial independence."
If nominated to the high court, Luttig is likely to get a full dose of the medicine he prescribed for judges, not only from the press but from advocacy groups. His decisions sometimes hit hot buttons.
Earlier this month, when the Supreme Court upheld federal power to override California's approval of medical uses for marijuana, Justice Scalia invoked a 1999 4th Circuit decision in which Luttig explained why even home-grown marijuana could be banned under federal law. Banning marijuana was part of a "comprehensive statutory scheme" that the federal government was entitled to enact, Luttig said, despite the high court's recent trend toward favoring state power.
That same 1999 decision overturned key parts of the federal Violence Against Women Act, though, with Luttig asserting that the law exceeded the enumerated powers of Congress. His ruling began, "We the people, distrustful of power, and believing that government limited and dispersed protects freedom best ...."
But Luttig's independent streak also leads him, at times, to veer sharply from conservative orthodoxy. In the partial-birth abortion case Richmond Medical Center v. Gilmore in 2000, Luttig said that because of Supreme Court precedent, the abortion right deserved "super-stare decisis" status -- a precedent that cannot be disturbed -- and, as a result, the Virginia partial-birth abortion law could not be upheld.
"Our responsibility is to follow faithfully its opinions," Luttig wrote, a stance that could change once Luttig is writing, rather than following, precedent.
Other Important information on him can be found at cnn.com .
Although Luttig's has not been a common household name in the United States, he has long been a prominent player in national legal circles and a rising star among conservatives during his decade-long tenure on the appeals court.
Luttig also is considered by many legal experts as someone likely to be on President George W. Bush's list of potential Supreme Court nominees. Over the years, he has earned a reputation as a smart and bold conservative, a strong advocate of federalism, and a jurist assured of his convictions.
"He is a man who is not tortured by doubt over the correctness of his judicial philosophy," said Bruce Fein, a lawyer and constitutional scholar who was a deputy attorney general in the Reagan administration.
Luttig, 47, was born in Tyler, Texas. He earned a law degree from the University of Virginia and lives in Northern Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C.
Former President George H.W. Bush nominated Luttig for the appeals court judgeship in 1991. Luttig had clerked for Burger in the mid-1980s, and before that, worked as a law clerk to Scalia when Scalia was an appeals judge in the District of Columbia.
Luttig then went on to work for the Justice Department during the first Bush administration, where he provided counsel during the Supreme Court nomination process for both Thomas and Souter.
"His reputation is one of an extremely smart, hard-line conservative," said Heather Gerken, an assistant professor at Harvard Law School, who also was a Supreme Court clerk for Souter. "Even those on the left, who disagree with his politics, really agree that he is very, very smart."
Gerken said Luttig is recognized as one of the nation's most prominent "feeder" judges, whose clerks go on to be law clerks at the Supreme Court. She noted that they are reputed to be among the most conservative clerks in the high court.
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