Dear LBJ Community,
With sadness, I write to inform you that Dagmar Hamilton, a professor and administrative leader within the LBJ School for over 32 years, passed away last week. In the words of a senior LBJ faculty member, “She was one of the kindest and most thoughtful people I have known.”
Professor Hamilton served as an Assistant Professor (1974-1977), Associate Professor (1977-1983), Associate Dean (1983-1987), Professor (1983-2006), and Professor Emeritus (since 2007). Her Policy Development classes on racial justice and environmental policy were very popular among students.
Prior to serving at the LBJ School, Professor Hamilton served as an attorney within the civil rights division of the United States Department of Justice (1965-1966) and as Staff Counsel to the Judiciary Committee in the United States House of Representatives (1973-1974).
We are fortunate to have had such an esteemed scholar and leader shape the LBJ School throughout its history. Professor Hamilton is treasured by many faculty and alumni, and I wish to express my condolences to anyone who knew her personally. Remembrances or reflections on Professor Hamilton are welcome on our memorial page.
Sincerely,
JR
Dagmar Hamilton, lawyer and professor emeritus at the University of Texas’s Lyndon B, Johnson School of Public Affairs and at the UT School of Law, beloved friend, mother, and wife, died Friday, November 17, 2023, at age 91. Dagmar (Dag) and her husband Robert (Bob) W. Hamilton moved to Austin in 1964 to teach at UT, accompanied by their three young children. Initially hesitant, Dag quickly came to adore Austin and thrived in the city's fervent mix of politics and academia.
Early years
Dag was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Jan. 10, 1932, to Eric Strandberg and Anna Sjostrom Strandberg. She was constantly surrounded by cousins and aunts, and she spoke Swedish before she learned English. The extended family spent summers in Stone Harbor, New Jersey, where she started racing her one-person sailboat at age 8. She attended Abington Friends School, then Swarthmore College. Both schools emphasized community, peaceful problem-solving, and academics.
College and law school, marriage, Washington, 3 children
While at Swarthmore, Dag met Bob, who was one year older. They married the summer after her senior year. She was awarded a full scholarship to the University of Chicago Law School where she joined Bob who was already studying there. Their law school years were fulfilling academically but financially lean. She once described that she and Bob had an agreement with their local movie theater to accept and hold onto one of Dag’s silver dollars (gifts from her father) so the couple could attend a movie and then return with cash a few days later to trade back for the silver dollar. They only lost a few silver dollars this way.
In 1955, Dag and Bob moved to Washington while Bob clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark. Dag completed the final year of her J.D. at American University in Washington, D.C. in 1961.
Move to Austin, teaching government, and writing with Supreme Court Justice William Douglas
In 1962, Dag began working for Justice William O. Douglas of the US Supreme Court as a book researcher and editor. She worked on topics across a broad spectrum: the environment, the value of dissent, civil liberties, civil rights, and Douglas’ autobiographies. They often corresponded by mail daily, sending each other clippings of articles and snippets of news. This ongoing work and friendship continued for the next 18 years until his death.
In 1964, Dag and Bob and their three young children moved to Austin, where Bob started teaching at UT Law School, where he became a nationally known scholar on corporations. From 1965 to 1966, Dag worked on poll tax cases across the American South as an attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the US Justice Department.
In 1966, Dag and a few other women lawyers were hired to teach in the Government department at UT. She later said she would always be grateful to a senior administrator for “doing what I can’t imagine any other official at his level doing...he ignored the nepotism rules, and he hired not one, but three law school wives, including me, to teach American Government. Basic American government to freshmen at UT.”
She taught in the UT Government department until 1972 when she took a sabbatical to work full-time editing Justice William O. Douglas’s autobiography.
In 1965, Dag and Bob bought a mid-century modern house on a dirt road in Westlake Hills. It provided a warm backdrop for many parties for their students and dinners for their tightly knit group of friends, especially the Fernea and Fath families. The house, set on a hillside deep among trees, was for years invisible save for a distinctive mailbox at the bottom of the hill with a special plastic Washington post newspaper receptacle, as Dag could not part with daily deliveries of the paper, even if it arrived days late.
In the summer academic break of 1968, Dag and Bob and the children set off on the first of what became many annual family explorations to the American West. This was the start of a tradition of driving north and west, sometimes as far as British Columbia, while camping, hiking, and backpacking along the way.
Nixon Impeachment Inquiry
In 1973, Dag accepted a position as Staff Counsel for the Judiciary Committee of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC. She was one of three women hired along with 35 men; she later said “For 1973 even that was radical”. According to the New York Times they worked under conditions that suggested a classified defense project. Dag was part of a 6–7 person team analyzing the U.S. founders’ impeachment intentions and English legal precedents. This analysis was essential to the committee’s proceeding on an impeccably constitutional basis. The team found that both English and U.S tradition defined impeachable offenses as those that injured society itself, including attempts to subvert the Constitution.
LBJ School and other institutions
In the fall of 1974, the family returned to Austin, and Dag started teaching at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, shortly after the school was founded. She remained a beloved professor there until 2006, teaching seminars on school desegregation, affirmative action, and ethical problems confronting the individual in a bureaucracy, as well as core courses in policy development. She had a joint appointment at the Law School, and taught classes with students from both the LBJ School and the Law School, including a seminar on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Dag served as Associate Dean of the LBJ School from 1983-1987, and she also helped establish and direct the dual degree program in law and public policy.
She was a visiting professor at the Washington University Law School, St. Louis, 1982, Queen Mary's College of Law London, 1987-88, and the University of Maine Law School Portland, 1992 and 2002.
Professor, advocate, and reader
Dag was known for holding her students to a high standard and for lacing her public policy classes with real-world anecdotes. She was passionately supportive of her students, writing long and thorough recommendations and fiercely advocating for them if needed. She maintained connections to many of her students long after they graduated. She also mentored many younger faculty members and was committed to adding more women to the faculty.
Dag’s office library of almost 1,000 volumes describes the range of her interests. She held, had read, and frequently loaned out to students, volumes on the US Supreme Court, impeachment, constitutional law, public policy, US presidents, civil rights, and environmental law.
Personal and Affiliations
Dag had many friends and a large community of politically minded, socially conscious people. However, she never cared about a person’s provenance or education, and to her, the person came first. If you borrowed her car (a 2-liter Fiat Spider convertible, later followed by a Volvo station wagon imported from Sweden) and drove around Austin, you would probably have been greeted by waves from fellow professors, her hairdresser, former students, neighbors in Westlake Hills, and UT parking attendants.
In 1992, Dag and Bob bought a former military shed converted to a house on Cushings island in Maine. For some time, they taught the fall semester at the University of Maine Law School, and the spring semester at UT. Dag bought a second-hand Bullseye daysailer and enjoyed returning to her deeply familiar sailing experiences from her youth. The house continues to provide a gathering place for their children and grandchildren.
Dag was a member of the American Law Institute, Texas Bar, The Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, Swarthmore College Alumni Council (representative), Kappa Beta Phi (honorary), and Phi Kappa Phi (honorary).
Dag is survived by three children, Eric Hamilton (Jan Jackson), Randy Hamilton (Jennie Caughran), and Meredith Hamilton, as well as 7 grandchildren, many nieces and nephews, and siblings-in-law Leslie and Douglas Hamilton. Her husband Robert (Bob) W. Hamilton died in 2018.
There will be an open memorial service for Dagmar on April 6th, 2024, at 11 a.m. at St Stephen’s School Chapel, Austin, Texas, for friends, family, former students, and colleagues.