Hugh C. Macgill

Hugh C. Macgill
Oliver Ellsworth Research Professor & Dean Emeritus

Biography

Hugh Macgill teaches Constitutional Law and Torts. He earned his BA at Yale in 1965, majoring in Russian, and his law degree at the University of Virginia in 1968. He served in the Army Security Agency as a Mandarin Chinese language specialist. After two years as a Reginald Heber Smith Community Lawyer Fellow, working in Baltimore and the Twin Cities, he was a graduate fellow at Yale Law School in 1970-71, on a Bush Foundation Fellowship, and a Fellow in Law and the Humanities at Harvard in 1975-76. His scholarly publications deal with constitutional law, both federal and state, U.S. legal history, and the jurisdiction of federal courts.

Macgill joined the Connecticut faculty in 1971. He served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs 1984-88, and as Dean of the Law School from 1990-2000. He has been a visiting professor at Eotvos Lorand University (Budapest), the University of International Business and Economics (Beijing), the University of Exeter (U.K.) and the University of Aix-Marseille (France). He is a Life Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and a James W. Cooper Fellow of the Connecticut Bar Foundation.

A frequent television commentator on legal issues, especially those involving the Supreme Court, Macgill has been Chair of the Connecticut Humanities Council, President of Neighborhood Legal Services (Hartford), President of the Connecticut Historical Society, Chairman of the State Ethics Commission, Chairman of the Connecticut Urban Legal Initiative and President of the Connecticut Bar Foundation. Other civic activities include the Greater Hartford HIV Action Initiative, Connecticut Law Revision Commission, Capital Area Foundation for Equal Justice, Speaker’s Ad Hoc Advisory Committee on Judicial Diversity, the Center for First Amendment Rights, and service as trustee of the Watkinson Library (Trinity College), the Lewis Walpole Library (Yale), and Miss Porter’s School. He is also a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the Yale Edition of the Private Papers of James Boswell.