West Virginia University - News and Information Services
WVU law professor, human rights advocate to head Northeastern University law school
A West Virginia University law professor known for her human rights efforts has been named dean of the Northeastern University School of Law in Boston, effective July 1.
Emily Spieler said the new position will allow her to continue and expand upon her work in human rights and public interest advocacy.
"Professor Spieler is, and has been, an excellent and well-respected law professor and community member," said John Fisher, dean of the WVU College of Law. "Though we wish her all the best in her new endeavor, her absence will be duly noted."
Spieler is WVU’s Hale J. & Roscoe P. Posten Professor of Law. She started with the University’s Institute for Labor Studies in 1983 and has taught at the WVU law school since 1990.
This past fall, she became one of only two WVU law school faculty ever to receive a prestigious Fulbright Award to study and teach abroad.
While at Ireland’s University of Cork, Spieler – former commissioner of the West Virginia Workers Compensation Fund – studied the country’s employment and disability laws.
In addition to winning this year’s WVU’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Achievement Award, Spieler became the first recipient of the statewide West Virginia Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Commission "Living the Dream" Award for Advocacy of Justice in 1986, an award she earned while serving as the state’s first deputy attorney general for civil rights.
She has continued to strive for social justice since that time, working with the Human Rights Commission from 1990-97 and serving as the founder and first president of the Community Coalition for Social Justice, a group that unites all interested in Morgantown’s social justice issues.
She was hearing examiner of the West Virginia Human Rights Commission from 1982-83 and state deputy attorney general for civil rights from 1985-87.
Spieler was in private practice in the Charleston area from 1978-83, specializing in labor, employment and civil rights law.
In 1978, she came to West Virginia from Massachusetts to co-direct the Cabin Creek Health Association’s Occupational Health Project at Dawes.
She was special assistant attorney general for the Massachusetts Department of Public
Health from 1975-77, and from 1976-78, she was in private practice in Cambridge, Mass., specializing in employment law.
In 1974, she was a partner in the Massachusetts law firm of Allen, Flaherty, Rosenberg, Saltzman and Spieler.
She graduated magna cum laude from Cambridge, Massachusetts’ Harvard-Radcliffe College in 1969 and the Yale College of Law in New Haven, Conn., in 1973.
Spieler said she will still spend time in Morgantown. Her husband, Dr. Greg Wagner, will continue at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health’s Division of Respiratory Disease Studies.
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