Eve Hill

At Roxbury Correctional Institution, a medium-security prison near Hagerstown, Maryland, blind prisoners could not read their mail, including letters from their lawyers, or the inmate handbook. They could not use the commissary or the library on their own, or file a grievance or ask for medical care without another prisoner’s help, and their suit alleged that the dependence had exposed them to extortion, theft and sexual exploitation. They were kept there even when they qualified for lower security or for programs at the state’s other prisons, and they were shut out of the jobs and work programs that taught skills, paid higher wages and earned credits toward release.

Nine current and former Roxbury prisoners brought the case, Brown v. Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, in the federal court in Baltimore, and Hill and her colleagues represented them, with support from the National Federation of the Blind and the Prisoner Rights Information System of Maryland. On May 13, 2019, Judge Richard D. Bennett denied the state’s motion for summary judgment on their claims under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act, and a week later the parties told the court they had settled.

The state agreed to install computers running text-to-speech software, document scanners and other assistive technology in the library, the classrooms and elsewhere; to provide qualified people to read aloud and write for blind prisoners, Braille instruction and training in independent living; and to pay $1.4 million in damages and attorneys’ fees, which the Board of Public Works approved in June 2019. “These blind inmates do not seek special treatment,” said Mark Riccobono, the federation’s president.

A Ballot Marked in Private

Michigan voters approved no-reason absentee voting in 2018. In Powell v. Benson, filed in Detroit in 2020 against Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and the state’s director of elections, Michael Powell, Fred Wurtzel and the National Federation of the Blind of Michigan alleged that the state offered no absentee ballot a blind voter could complete without help. Hill represented the federation. On May 19, 2020, Judge Gershwin A. Drain entered a consent decree requiring Michigan to acquire, in time for the August 4 primary, a remote accessible vote-by-mail system on which voters with print disabilities could review and mark their absentee ballots electronically, privately and independently before printing and returning them, along with accessible request forms, a permanent list of voters who wanted an accessible ballot for every election, and training for county and local election officials. “Voting has always been an important part of my life,” Powell said.

That summer the American Council of the Blind of Virginia, the National Federation of the Blind of Virginia and five Virginia voters, among them Carshena Gary, sued the Virginia Department of Elections, with Hill among their lawyers. The complaint was filed on July 27, 2020; on August 31, Judge Claude M. Hilton approved a consent decree under which voters with print disabilities could receive and mark their absentee ballots electronically for the November 3 election.

A Staircase and a Login Screen

Websites and apps that are not coded to accessibility guidelines do not work well with the screen-reading software blind people use to have a page read aloud. In June 2018 the National Federation of the Blind, its Washington affiliate and three blind individuals, represented by Hill, reached an agreement with the Boeing Employees’ Credit Union. The credit union agreed to make its website fully accessible by March 31, 2019 and its mobile banking app by May 31, 2019, to let blind people test the services throughout the work, and to adopt policies, among them employee training, to keep them accessible. “Blind people must budget, keep track of our accounts, pay our bills, make deposits, and transfer funds,” Riccobono said.

In April 2024 the Justice Department adopted a rule under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act requiring state and local governments to make their websites and mobile apps meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1, with governments serving 50,000 or more people due to comply by April 24, 2026; the Department of Health and Human Services adopted a rule for the recipients of its funding the next month. On April 20, 2026, four days before the deadline, the Justice Department issued an interim final rule postponing it a year, and HHS postponed its own on May 11. On May 21, Hill and Michael Abrams, with Democracy Forward, sued both departments for the federation in the federal court in Maryland, alleging that the delays had been adopted without the notice and comment the Administrative Procedure Act requires, and asked the court to restore the original deadlines.

Everywhere, in Every Role

Hill graduated magna cum laude from Sweet Briar College in 1986 and cum laude from Cornell Law School in 1989. She was executive director of the Disability Rights Legal Center at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles; director of the District of Columbia’s Office of Disability Rights, responsible for the city government’s compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act; and senior vice president of the Burton Blatt Institute at Syracuse University, where she directed its ADA and disability civil-rights work.

From 2011 to January 2017 she was a deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division, overseeing disability rights, education and Title VI enforcement and the division’s American Indian Working Group; she enforced digital-accessibility requirements and put the integration requirements of the Supreme Court’s Olmstead decision into effect in employment and education. She was part of the team that negotiated the Marrakesh Treaty, which eases access to published works for people who are blind, visually impaired or print-disabled, and testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in support of ratifying the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. She joined Brown, Goldstein & Levy in February 2017. Asked in 2024 by the American Bar Association’s Commission on Disability Rights what disability pride meant to her, Hill described people with disabilities moving past institutions, low expectations and shame, and said that “people with disabilities being everywhere, in every role, is the greatest impact of the disability rights movement.”

A Husband’s Coverage

A data analyst at Catholic Relief Services in Baltimore had health coverage for his husband until October 2017, when, after months of discussions with the agency’s human-resources staff, it removed his husband from its plan. Hill represented him, as John Doe, in a suit filed in 2020. On August 3, 2022, Judge Catherine C. Blake held that the agency had discriminated against him in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and the Equal Pay Act, writing that the case “does not involve CRS’ spiritual or ministerial functions.”

After the Supreme Court of Maryland held in 2023 that the state’s religious exemption reaches employees whose jobs directly further a religious organization’s core mission, Judge Julie Rubin heard a three-day trial in October 2024, and on April 21, 2025 she found that his job did not: “Doe did not directly serve the poor and vulnerable overseas.” Catholic Relief Services was ordered to pay him $60,000. It appealed, and the Fourth Circuit heard argument on March 17, 2026.

The Exam Room

On January 20, 2025, an executive order directed that transgender women in federal prisons be moved to men’s facilities and that their hormone treatment end. On February 4, Hill and co-counsel from Rosen Bien Galvan & Grunfeld, the National Center for Lesbian Rights and GLAD Law won a temporary restraining order from Judge Royce C. Lamberth in the federal court in Washington barring the Bureau of Prisons from carrying out the order against three transgender women.

In June 2025 the Justice Department served an administrative subpoena on Children’s National Hospital in Washington demanding the names, birth dates, Social Security numbers, diagnoses, clinical assessments and parental-authorization forms of children who had received transgender health care there. Hill and GLAD Law represented eight families who moved to quash it in November. On January 21, 2026, Judge Julie R. Rubin quashed the subpoena, finding that it “appears to have no purpose other than to intimidate and harass” the hospital and the families and calling it “the classic impermissible fishing expedition.” The ruling, Hill said, “affirms that the government cannot intrude into the exam room.”

The Justice Department had sent at least twenty nearly identical subpoenas to hospitals. On May 9, 2026, Hill and her co-counsel filed In re Administrative Subpoenas to Children’s Hospitals for eleven families whose children had been treated at hospitals including Children’s National, Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, Michigan Medicine and Rady Children’s Hospital. History has shown, Hill said, “what happens when the government collects lists of the members of groups it disfavors.” On June 10, Judge Rubin reaffirmed her order quashing the Children’s National subpoena.

Land Deeded for Old Soldiers

In 1888 Senator John P. Jones and Arcadia B. de Baker deeded 300 acres between Santa Monica and Los Angeles to the United States for a branch of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, and de Baker later gave 300 acres more. In the years before the veterans sued, unhoused veterans lived in tents along San Vicente Boulevard, outside the fence of what had become the West Los Angeles VA campus, in an encampment called Veterans Row.

Fourteen unhoused veterans and the National Veterans Foundation sued Secretary of Veterans Affairs Denis McDonough in November 2022, represented by Public Counsel and co-counsel including Brown, Goldstein & Levy, with Hill among their lawyers. The class Judge David O. Carter certified in May 2024, veterans in Los Angeles County with serious mental illness or traumatic brain injuries, numbered about 3,000. Developers building housing on the campus counted veterans’ disability compensation as income, so payments for injuries suffered in service could put a veteran over the income limit for supportive housing; in July 2024 Judge Carter held that policy facially discriminatory. The VA had committed to 1,200 supportive units on the campus by 2030, and at trial it argued that it had no room for more and that further relief would strain its finances and limit its flexibility.

After a bench trial from August 6 to August 30, 2024, Judge Carter, a Marine who had served in Vietnam, ruled for the veterans and ordered the VA to build 750 units of temporary housing within eighteen months and 1,800 units of permanent supportive housing within six years. On December 23, 2025, a Ninth Circuit panel of Judges Consuelo M. Callahan, Roopali H. Desai and Ana de Alba affirmed the Rehabilitation Act judgment against the VA and the order to build the units. To the VA’s argument that the veterans had meaningful access to its health care without housing, Judge de Alba wrote, “Although this may be one interpretation of the evidence, that is not the standard on appeal.” To its argument that housing on the campus would increase segregation, she answered, “The record shows otherwise.”

On September 11, 2026, the Ninth Circuit denied the government’s petition for rehearing en banc, leaving in place the order to build 2,550 units of housing on the campus the 1888 deed had set aside for disabled soldiers.