Elizabeth Hillman, Professor of Law

Professor Hillman was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She attended Duke University on an Air Force ROTC scholarship, earned a degree in electrical engineering, and served as a space operations officer and orbital analyst in Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Base, Colorado Springs. Before joining the Hastings faculty in 2007, she taught history at the U.S. Air Force Academy and law at the Rutgers University School of Law, Camden. She is President of the National Institute for Military Justice, a non-profit dedicated to promoting fairness in and public understanding of military justice. She is also co-legal director of the Palm Center, a public policy research institute at UCSB that has played a key role in reducing sexual orientation discrimination in the U.S. armed forces. She frequently lectures on U.S. military justice, history, and culture to scholarly and military audiences in the U.S. and abroad. She is now studying the law and politics of strategic bombing, military sexual violence and veterans’ claims and benefits.  And she still roots for the Steelers. 

Courses Taught: Constitutional Law I & II, Wills & Trusts, Civil Procedure I, Military Law, Law & Biography, and the Community Law Program (through which students teach in high schools as part of the national Marshall-Brennan Constitutional Literacy Program).

What I hope you get from a legal education at Hastings is... insight into the law and into yourself:  "There is no man so good that if he submitted all his actions and thoughts to the scrutiny of the laws, he would not deserve hanging ten times in his life." Montaigne, Essays, book 3, chapter 9 (1580).