Roderick M Hills Jr

Professor Roderick Hills teaches and writes in a variety of public law areas – constitutional law (with an emphasis on doctrines governing federalism), local government law, land-use regulation, jurisdiction and conflicts of law, education law. His interest in these topics springs from their common focus on the problems and promise of decentralization. The United States has one of the most decentralized systems of regulation in the world, placing enormous power over land, schools, assistance to the needy (among many other topics) under the control of subnational governments, ranging from school districts to states. Professor Hills holds bachelor's and law degrees from Yale University, and was a Century Fellow with the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago in 1988. While attending law school, Hills was a member of the Yale Law Journal and co-editor in chief of the Yale Journal of Law & Humanities. Following law school, he served as a law clerk for the Hon. Patrick Higginbotham of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and prior to joining the Michigan Law faculty, he practiced law in Boulder, Colorado.