[Editor’s Note: This blog is the first in a series of interviews with faculty and staff at the Law School.] 

Professor Gordon Hylton is a graduate of Oberlin College, where he majored in History and English Literature. He holds a J.D. and M.A. in History from the University of Virginia and a Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization from Harvard University. Following law school, he clerked for Justice Albertis S. Harrison and Chief Justice Lawrence I’Anson of the Virginia Supreme Court and worked for the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. He joined the Marquette faculty in 1995, after teaching at IIT Chicago Kent College of Law and Washington University. He has also taught as a visiting professor at Washington and Lee University and the University of Virginia and served as a Fulbright Lecturer in Law in Ukraine. His current research interests are in the history of the legal profession, constitutional history, and the legal history of American sports.

Question: What motivated you to pursue a law degree and ultimately teach law?

When I was a senior in college, my plan was to go to graduate school in history. However, the job market for historians was supposedly terrible, and I was intrigued by the idea of being a lawyer, even though there had never been a lawyer in my family. I ended up splitting the difference by enrolling in a joint law and history program at the University of Virginia, in my home state.

After three years at UVA, I had completed my law degree and the coursework for a master’s degree in history. At that point, I accepted a clerkship with the Virginia Supreme Court, and while clerking, I finished my master’s thesis. During that year, I decided that I wanted to be a history professor rather than a lawyer, so I enrolled in the History of American Civilization program at Harvard to work on a Ph.D. Although I planned to concentrate on American legal history as my major field, I felt I was leaving law for a career as a history professor.

However, while in graduate school, I decided that what I really wanted to do was to teach in a law school. I took a course called “Preparing for Law Teaching” at Harvard Law School, and after teaching for a year as an Instructor in the Harvard History Department, I entered law teaching at Chicago-Kent.