University of Houston Law Center Professor Douglas Moll has received the 2024–2025 Distinguished Leadership in Teaching Excellence Award from the University’s Teaching Excellence Award Committee. The honor recognizes his outstanding commitment to teaching at the Law Center.
Moll, who has taught for almost three decades, appreciates the recognition. “Faculty get very little feedback on their teaching. We don’t observe one another, and other than student evaluations and informal student comments, we have no sense of whether what we are doing is effective,” he said. “An award like this signals to me that my teaching efforts are resulting in positive student outcomes, and that sort of feedback motivates me to keep working on improving my teaching.”
Greg Vetter, associate dean for academic affairs at the UH Law Center, congratulates Professor Moll on his award.
He breaks down his teaching philosophy into two simple questions: “What do my students need to learn to prepare them for successful careers as lawyers? As a teacher, how can I best communicate with my students to maximize their ability to learn in my classes?”
Moll’s interest in law started in high school with his participation in debate and public speaking. “That led me naturally to law. Law practice was interesting, but I found myself wanting to explore various legal questions in greater depth,” he said. “That led me to teaching law. Here [at UHLC] I get paid to think about legal issues for as long as I wish.”
He encourages UHLC students to think not just about how the law functions, but also about its shortcomings and limitations. There are three questions that Moll attempts to structure his classes around. “First, what is the law? Second, how does one use or apply the law? Third, what should the law be?” shared Moll, adding, “If I am successful in structuring my course around these three areas, the students learn a framework for analyzing legal issues that is useful well beyond the confines of my classroom.”
Moll, who is the A. A. White Professor of Law at UHLC, graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1994. After a year of clerking for a federal appellate judge and two years of commercial litigation, he joined the Law Center in the fall of 1997 as an associate professor of law. During his time as a professor, Moll has balanced teaching with writing numerous law review articles, three casebooks (two on business organizations and one on business torts), and two concise hornbooks (one on business organizations and one on business torts). He is also a co-author of three treatises for lawyers—one on closely held corporations, one on oppression of minority shareholders and LLC members, and one on partnership law.
Moll’s approach to teaching has earned him this award and others throughout his career. In 1998, 1999, 2003, 2011, 2014, 2018, 2021, 2024, and 2025, Professor Moll was honored
with a Professor of the Year award by the Order of the Barons. He has also been awarded the University of Houston Teaching Excellence Award twice, in 2000 and 2017.
This latest Distinguished Leadership in Teaching Excellence Award (which is distinct from the UH Teaching Excellence Award) was celebrated with a ceremony on April 24 at the Conrad Hilton Ballroom in the University Hilton Hotel. The award came with a $25,000 prize, which was broken into a $15,000 cash award and $10,000 in departmental support.
Q&A with Douglas Moll
What do you enjoy most about teaching?DM: The interactions with students, seeing the “light bulb” come on when I have explained something well, and hearing from graduates that they actually use something that I taught them.
The awards recognize your teaching excellence. What makes you a successful teacher?DM: I think two of the keys to success in teaching are organization and communication. If you are not organized in how you are presenting the material, the students cannot follow you, and unnecessary confusion will result. Even if you are organized, if you cannot communicate concepts to students who are hearing the material for the first time, you will be less effective.As faculty, we study and address these concepts every year, and it becomes increasingly more difficult to remember the complexity presented by the material when it was confronted for the first time. Of course, the students, year after year, are confronting the material for the first time. Thus, the challenge for the experienced professor is to constantly remind oneself of the students’ perspective. In so doing, the professor can focus on communicating the material in a manner that can be understood by those who are literally “brand new” to the subject.
What keeps you inspired about your work?DM: We have many great teachers at the Law Center, and hearing about things that my colleagues do in the classroom often inspires me to try something new or to do something better in my own classes.
What would people be surprised to learn about you?DM: I like trashy TV and I am one of those people obsessed with Pickleball.
Do you have any advice to share with students?DM: Be nice and work hard. Everything else is just details
Original source can be found here.