Lukken received his BS degree with honors from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University and his Juris Doctor degree from Lewis and Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon. He is a member of the Illinois Bar.

 

Beginning in 1993, Lukken worked for five years as a legislative assistant to Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Indiana) and, from 1997 through 2001, as counsel for the Senate Agriculture Committee under Lugar. He specialized in futures and derivatives markets and was involved in the development, drafting and passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 that allowed Enron to engage in online trading without oversight.

 

As acting chairman, Lukken serves as chairman of the CFTC’s Energy Markets Advisory Committee. He also served as chairman of the CFTC’s Global Markets Advisory Committee (GMAC) from October 2003 through January 2008.

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President Bush nominated Lukken in September 2007 to serve as chairman of the CFTC. But Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Washington) blocked Lukken’s ascension as chairman. She and several Democratic colleagues also asked the CFTC’s inspector general to investigate the agency’s handling of a crude-oil report that dismissed speculation as a cause of the mid-2008 spike in oil prices.