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School of Law

Daniel Kiel

Daniel Kiel

FedEx Professor of Law; Director of Faculty Development

Phone 901.678.1672 Email dkiel@memphis.edu Fax Office Law School, Office 346

About Professor Kiel

Professor Kiel has been a member of the faculty since 2008. He teaches Constitutional Law, Property, Education & Civil Rights, and Voting Rights. He has been recognized both with the University’s Distinguished Teaching Award (2017) and the Law School’s Professor of the Year Award (2026). Professor Kiel's scholarly work centers on inequality in the education system, particularly along lines of race, as well as constitutional questions of citizenship and justice. For his work, he was awarded the Martin Luther King, Jr., Human Rights Award by the University of Memphis (2013).

Among Professor Kiel’s scholarship are a documentary film and a recent book. In 2011, Professor Kiel wrote and directed The Memphis 13, a documentary film sharing the stories of the first students to desegregate public schools in Memphis. The award-winning film premiered at the National Civil Rights Museum on desegregation’s 50th anniversary and it has been featured at film festivals, universities, and museums across the country. Professor Kiel is also the author of The Transition: Interpreting Justice from Thurgood Marshall to Clarence Thomas (Stanford, 2023), which juxtaposes the lives and work of Justices Marshall and Thomas to explore the transformation of the Supreme Court. His work has also been published in a variety of scholarly journals as well as the Washington Post, USA Today, and several other outlets.

Professor Kiel was the recipient of a 2015 Fulbright Fellowship, which allowed him to spend a semester at the University of the Free State in South Africa undertaking comparative research on educational disparities and reform efforts. He has also served the University of Memphis community as an associate director of the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change, providing support for several of the Institute’s initiatives to advance social change and strengthen democracy.

In addition to his scholarly work, Professor Kiel has served the public through legislative testimony, serving as an expert witness, and through appointment to public bodies. Specifically, he served as a commissioner on the Shelby County Transition Planning Commission (2010-13), which was charged with coordinating the largest school district merger in American history. More recently, he was appointed to the City of Memphis Integrity Policing Initiative (2025) to pursue police reform in the aftermath of findings of unconstitutional police behavior.

Prior to entering teaching, Professor Kiel practiced civil litigation at firms in Boston and Memphis and also represented criminal defendants in post-conviction matters at both the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals. Professor Kiel is a member of the Board of Scholars of Facing History and Ourselves and was the founding board chair of Just City, a criminal justice reform non-profit. He currently serves on the boards of the ACLU of Tennessee and The Memphis 13 Foundation.

Education

J.D., Harvard Law School, 2004; B.A., University of Texas at Austin, 2001

Admitted

Massachusetts (inactive), Tennessee 

Experience

Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law (2008-present); Fulbright Scholar, The University of the Free State (South Africa) (2015); Adjunct Professor of Legal Methods, Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law (2006-2008); Associate, Burch, Porter & Johnson (2005-2008); Associate, Bingham McCutchen (2004-2005). 

Teaching Interests

Education Law & Policy, Civil Rights, Constitutional Law, Property, Remedies, Law & Documentary Studies

Selected Publications