Eve Hill

A Staircase and a Login Screen

A staircase excludes; so does a login screen. Eve Hill has built her career on the insight that the two are the same legal event — a design choice that decides, before any human being makes a decision, who can enter and who is turned away. Her cases reach physical and digital access, effective communication, voting, education, employment, and equal treatment for LGBTQ+ people, and each of them converts a broad promise of inclusion into a specific operational duty: the document must come in Braille, the ballot must be markable in private, the app must speak to a screen reader, the benefit must extend to the spouse who is actually there. Access, in her practice, is a design requirement rather than an accommodation arranged after someone has already been turned away.

Hill graduated magna cum laude from Sweet Briar College and took her law degree cum laude from Cornell in 1989. She was executive director of the Disability Rights Legal Center at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, running civil-rights litigation, mediation, and outreach. She became the founding director of the District of Columbia's Office of Disability Rights, charged with bringing an entire city government into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act — a job that meant translating a civil-rights statute into procurement rules, personnel policies, and building plans. She served as senior vice president of the Burton Blatt Institute at Syracuse University, directing its ADA and disability civil-rights work nationally.

Enforcing the Nation's Promise

From 2011 to January 2017, Hill served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice — one of the highest-ranking disability-rights lawyers in the country. Her portfolio spanned disability rights, education, and Title VI enforcement, along with the division's American Indian Working Group, during years when the federal government pressed the ADA's integration mandate into new territory: community living instead of institutions, real jobs instead of segregated workshops, technology that works for the people who rely on it most. She carried the work beyond the border as well, participating in the negotiation of the Marrakesh Treaty, which opens access to published works for people who are blind or print-disabled, and testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in support of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

Hill moved from the department to Brown, Goldstein & Levy, the Baltimore firm long associated with the National Federation of the Blind and disability civil-rights litigation. As a partner, she represents clients seeking access to prison services, voting, digital banking, employment benefits and housing.

The Operating Manual of Equality

In Brown v. Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, Hill represented blind prisoners who could not read the documents that governed their own confinement — the notices, forms, handbooks, and educational materials that sighted prisoners take for granted. The settlement requires accessible formats, auxiliary aids, and services throughout the system, along with $1.4 million in damages and fees: a recognition that incarceration does not suspend the right to comprehend one's own life. In Powell v. Benson, she secured a consent decree requiring Michigan to provide an accessible absentee-voting system for voters with print disabilities, protecting the right to cast a private and independent ballot rather than accept a lesser vote mediated through another person's hands.

Her work for the National Federation of the Blind against Boeing Employees' Credit Union carried the same principle into digital banking, producing an agreement that requires the credit union's website and mobile app to be fully accessible to blind customers. Exclusion no longer requires a staircase or a locked door; a website, a document format, or an authentication step can decide whether a blind customer controls her own financial life, and Hill has made those technical choices answerable to civil-rights standards. The equality docket extends past disability. In Doe v. Catholic Relief Services, she won a federal district-court victory for a married gay employee whose spousal health coverage had been withdrawn, vindicating his claims under federal and Maryland law and restoring the benefits his family had been promised. In pending litigation she has represented transgender women in federal custody, winning early emergency protection while the cases proceed.

Hill and her colleagues — alongside Public Counsel and Inner City Law Center — represented unhoused veterans with disabilities in Powers v. McDonough, the suit over the West Los Angeles VA campus, land deeded more than a century ago as a home for old soldiers. The veterans had been sleeping outside the fence of land set aside for their care. After a full trial in 2024, a federal court ordered changes including housing and services on the campus itself; in late 2025 the Ninth Circuit upheld the judgment.

Everywhere, in Every Role

In 2026, The Arc Baltimore honored Hill with its Stanley S. Herr Advocacy Leadership Award, named for one of disability law's founding scholars. She has become one of the voices national newspapers call when disability rights collide with new technology, new workplaces, and new forms of exclusion.

Hill seeks remedies detailed enough to make a service usable: accessible formats, implementation deadlines, testing protocols and reporting obligations. The agreements govern ordinary operations so that people can use those services with privacy and autonomy. Blind prisoners must be able to read prison and library materials; voters with print disabilities must be able to mark an absentee ballot independently; blind credit-union customers must be able to use the website and mobile app. At the West Los Angeles VA campus, the judgment requires housing and services for veterans with disabilities. Each duty puts Hill's stated ambition — people with disabilities everywhere, in every role — into terms the responsible agency or business must carry out.