Michael Joseph Barta ’85

With great sadness, we report that our friend and classmate, Michael, died at home March 31, 2021. Michael came to Princeton from Radford, Va., where he played football, basketball, and ran track in high school. He is remembered by roommates as a keen basketball fan who avidly followed the Duke Blue Devils and continued to play himself, deep into adulthood. Michael was a member of the Aquinas Institute and Tiger Inn. He is fondly remembered for his entertaining storytelling, his broad smile and ready wit. Friends recall his generosity of spirit.

Michael majored in politics, graduating summa cum laude, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He graduated with distinction, cum laude, from Harvard Law School.

After graduation he clerked for Judge Jerome Ferris of the U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, followed by a period with Miller, Cassidy Larroca & Lewin, where he was the youngest attorney ever to be elected as a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers. He chaired the white-collar crime and corporate investigations groups at Baker Botts before moving to Dechert. While living in Washington, he taught trial advocacy at the Georgetown University Law Center.

Clients included the estate of Richard Nixon, the Republic of Venezuela, Samsung, NASCAR, Tomás Berdych, and Halliburton. Michael was perhaps proudest of a case he argued just out of law school, when he won a new trial and overturned a death sentence for an Oklahoma man on death row for the Geronimo Bank murders.

Michael loved the Shenandoah Valley and spent happy times with friends and family at his farm in Edinburg, Va. He had recently retired to the mountains of North Carolina to be near his children, Jack and Katie. The class sends sincerest condolences to both, to Michael’s parents, and to his siblings, Mark, Amy, and Laura ’91.