Professor Emily Spieler, who came to Northeastern Law in 2002 as the school’s first female dean and continued as a faculty member after stepping down in 2012, retired in June. Professor Jeremy Paul, who served as dean from 2012 through 2018, offers thoughts on Professor Spieler’s contributions to the Northeastern community.

It is hard for all of us to say goodbye to Emily Spieler as she retires from our faculty and ends her full-time presence in our classrooms. Fortunately, it will be impossible to forget the indelible contributions she made to Northeastern both as dean and faculty member, and so her presence in our hearts, not to mention our contact lists, will remain as vibrant as ever.

Emily was an outstanding dean for Northeastern. The beautiful classrooms and renovated Dockser Hall in which we teach and learn every day are a testament to her negotiating skills and careful husbandry of the law school’s financial resources. She built a faculty capable of inspiring students and shaping the law beyond campus due to her keen eye for what’s important: passion and commitment, as well as for what’s not: cookie-cutter credentials.

She invested wisely in signature programs such as health policy and law, an LLM degree, civil rights and restorative justice, and our innovation lab; these have blossomed into many of our most successful endeavors more than 10 years after she left the dean’s office.

Above all, Emily deserves extraordinary credit for preserving and enhancing Northeastern’s steadfast commitment to training lawyers to serve the public interest in an era when brutal economic pressures pushed law schools toward greater focus on placing students at large firms. Emily not only said the right things, but in her prior career as a powerful advocate for workers’ rights, she has done the right things. This made her voice on campus and across the country credible and compelling, and she used it often to great effect.

Of course, for me personally, Emily was indeed a very tough act to follow as dean. But because of the palpable sense of excitement about Northeastern shared throughout the community, the extraordinary people in key positions of leadership that Emily had assembled and her willingness to provide wise counsel without any sense of meddling, I will always be in her debt. So are we all. Congratulations, Emily, and good luck!

— Professor Jeremy Paul