Donald Hill
Professor of Law

Education:
B.A., 1966 Texas Southern University, Houston, Texas
J.D., 1967 Texas Southern University-Thurgood Marshall School of Law, Houston, Texas
LL.M., 1970 Yale University

Phone: (713) 313-7392

Fax: (713) 313-1049

Email: Donald Hill

Biographical Information

Professor Donald K. Hill was born in Houston, Texas in 1937. He attended elementary and high school in the city's Third Ward and graducated in 1955. He was awarded an E.E. Worthing Scholarship, which enabled him to attend Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana for one year. In 1956, he chose to transfer to the University of Texas along with the first class of African-American undergraduates to be admitted to the state university. He attended U.T. from 1956 to 1959, and then went to New York for a year.

Professor Hill returned to U.T. in 1960 for one-half of an academic year before volunteering for military service in the Army, where he spent two and a half years, of which eighteen months were served in Germany. He returned to the United States and enrolled in Texas Southern University in 1964 and in the law school in 1965. He graduated from law school in June 1967.

Professor Hill practiced law and worked for the Concentrated Employment Program, a Department of Labor funded jobs training program, as a contract specialist from 1967-1969. He applied for and was accepted to the Yale Law School Graduate Program in September 1969, receiving LLM in June 1970. During the summer of 1970, he was a Ford Fellow at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. In September of that year, he was appointed to the faculty at the University of Toledo (Ohio) where he served as assistant professor and Director of the University's Black Studies Program. In 1973, he returned to Texas to accept a teaching position at the Texas Southern University School of Law, later renamed the Thurgood Marshall School of Law. He was appointed an associate professor in 1973 and professor of law in 1977.

During the Carter administration, Professor Hill returned to Washington, D.C. to serve, during the summer sessions, as a professor in residence at the General Services Administration (Chief Counsel's office and the Regulatory Division) and two summers with the General and Legislative Counsel's office at the Central Intelligence Agency. over the course of thirty years at Texas Southern University, Professor Hill has served as Chairman of the University's Faculty Assembly and Senate, Director of the Mickey Leland Center on World Peace and Hunger, and Associate Dean of the Thurgood Marshall School of Law.

Professor Hill has published a number of law review articles in the administrative law and regulatory law fields, but his main concern is legal pedagogy and the education of minority and disadvantaged students. His latest published work is an article entitled Social Separation in America: Thurgood Marshall and the Texas Connection. The Article from which he will speak today is the second part of the Social Separation piece and it examines the use of socio-liguistics to change the meaning and intent of Brown V. The Board of Education, Topeka.