Karl Klare Celebration

Can you imagine summing up, in a few brief sentences, the brilliant, passionate and significant contributions that Karl Klare, George J. and Kathleen Waters Matthews Distinguished University Professor of Law, has made to Northeastern, to legal education and to the cause of working people? Neither could we. On Friday, April 8, 2022, Northeastern Law hosted a full day celebrating Karl’s magnificent achievements — past, present and future. (He is not retiring!) Our extended conversation provided an opportunity for all of us to reflect on many of the topics upon which Karl’s imprint will be long lasting and to share our mutual admiration for a giant in the legal academy.

>> View speaker bios

Karl Klare: The Person Who Helped Us See the Tree for the Wood
A Tribute to Professor Karl Klare by the Honorable Albie Sachs, retired justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa
>> Read more

Video
Thank you to all who contributed to our conference honoring Professor Karl Klare. Couldn't make it in person? Watch the entire conference via the screen below.

Conference Video (Full Version)

Featured Speaker:
Duncan Kennedy
Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence Emeritus, Harvard Law School

Karl Klare Tribute: John Becker ’94
John Becker ’94, an accomplished labor attorney at Sandulli Grace in Boston, shares a tribute to Professor Karl Klare, whom he credits with changing the course of his life.

Photos

Our day featured four panels with prominent speakers and plenty of time for audience participation.
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Program

Speaker Bios

Libby Adler 

Libby Adler holds a joint appointment as professor of law and women’s, gender and sexuality studies with Northeastern University’s School of Law and the College of Social Sciences and Humanities. She teaches Constitutional Law, Sexuality, Gender and the Law, Family Law and Administrative Law. Professor Adler has written extensively on sexuality, gender, family and children, including foster care, and draws heavily from queer and critical theory. Her book, Gay Priori: A Queer Critical Legal Studies Approach to Law Reform, was published in April 2018 by Duke University Press. She is also a co-editor of the casebook Mary Joe Frug’s Women and the Law (4th ed.) and has written about contemporary legal issues arising out of Nazism. 

 

Aziza Ahmed  

Aziza Ahmed is a professor of law at UC Irvine School of Law. She was previously a member of the faculty of Northeastern University School of Law. Her scholarship examines the intersection of law, politics and science in the fields of constitutional law, criminal law, health law and family law. This work advances multiple scholarly conversations, including those related to law and social movements, race and the law, and feminist legal theory. 

Professor Ahmed is the author of the forthcoming book Feminism’s Medicine: Law, Science, and Social Movements in the AIDS Response, to be published by Cambridge University Press, and co-editor of the handbook, Race, Racism, and the Law, forthcoming from Edward Elgar Publishing.  

  

Diamond Ashiagbor 

Diamond Ashiagbor is professor of law and director of postgraduate research at the University of Kent Law School in the United Kingdom. She is an interdisciplinary legal scholar who teaches and researches on labor law, equality, regions (European Union and African Union), trade and development, and the economic sociology of law. She is a graduate of the University of Oxford and holds a PhD from the European University Institute, Florence. Her most recent edited book is Re-imagining Labour Law for Development: Informal Work in the Global North and South (Hart Publishing, 2019). Her current research examines race and the colonial origins of contemporary labor markets and labor law.  

Professor Ashiagbor has been the recipient of a US-EU Fulbright Research Award, a Fernand Braudel Senior Fellowship, a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship and previously held positions at SOAS University of London, University College London and visiting positions at Columbia Law School, Melbourne Law School and Osgoode Hall. She is a member of the editorial boards of the London Review of International Law and European Law Open and is a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. 

  

Nathaniel Berman 

Nathaniel Berman is the Rahel Varnhagen Professor in Brown University’s Religious Studies Department. The overarching theme in Professor Berman’s scholarship concerns the experiences of “otherness” in law, politics and religion. For much of his career, Professor Berman’s scholarship focused on the construction of modern internationalism through its relationships to nationalism and colonialism. It identified early 20th century international law as one of the sites of the invention of cultural modernism. His work on these issues has been broadly interdisciplinary, drawing on literary criticism, cultural studies, post-colonial theory and religious studies. More recently, his work has focused on the relationship between religion and legal and political discourse. For several years, he co-directed Brown’s Religion and Internationalism Project, a joint venture between the Cogut Institute and Brown’s Religious Studies Department. 

Professor Berman has also embarked on several major projects in Judaic studies. His work emphasizes the mythological strands of Kabbalah’s formative period in 12th and 13th century France and Spain. Pursuing his interest in otherness,” Professor Berman has explored complex Kabbalistic myths of the relationships between the divine and demonic realms.  

Professor Berman is the author of Divine and Demonic in the Poetic Mythology of the Zohar: the “Other Side” of Kabbalah (Brill, 2018) and Passion and Ambivalence: Colonialism, Nationalism, and International Law (Brill, 2011). 

  

Esteban Ceballos  

Esteban Hoyos-Ceballos is the dean of Universidad EAFIT School of Law. He holds a JSD and an LLM from Cornell University Law School and a JD from Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia). Throughout his career at EAFIT he has served as professor of constitutional law and director of the master’s degree in law. He has also taught at several Colombian universities and has been invited as a guest lecturer in Spain, Mexico and Chile. Before beginning his career at EAFIT, Dean Hoyos-Ceballos was a law clerk at the Colombian Constitutional Court. His areas of interest include constitutional law and theory; economic, social and cultural rights; clinical legal education and public interest law. 

  

Jeanne Charn 

Jeanne Charn is a senior lecturer on law at Harvard Law School. Professor Charn is a practitioner in all facets of civil representation of low- and moderate- income clients. She is nationally and internationally renowned as a leader of the clinical legal education movement. In 2014, the Association of American Law Schools honored her with the prestigious William Pincus Award for Outstanding Service and Commitment to Clinical Legal Education. Working with the late Gary Bellow, she founded the Legal Services Center (LSC) in Jamaica Plain, Mass., in 1979, which has evolved into the present-day WilmerHale Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School. For decades, the LSC has provided free legal services to thousands of low-income community members while simultaneously serving as a premier innovation engine for clinical legal education. 

 

Dan Danielsen 

Dan Danielsen is a professor of law at Northeastern University School of Law and previously spent many years as an international business lawyer. He teaches Corporations, Law and Development, International Business Regulation, International Law and Conflict of Laws. His research explores the complex role of the business firm in global governance. He is also faculty director of the Program on the Corporation, Law and Global Society, which fosters interdisciplinary research and discussion among scholars, policymakers and advocates to examine the corporation as an institutional form with social significance akin to the state, the family or the city. 

With a better understanding of the workings of private power in the global governance regime, Professor Danielsen hopes to develop new and more complex notions of economic participation, political pluralism and distributive justice in the creation and operation of the rules that shape global economic activity and more effective, participatory and accountable strategies for harnessing corporate power to enhance economic well-being and social welfare, particularly in the developing world. Most recently his work has focused on exploring the dominance of global supply chains in the global economy and the role of law in enabling and sustaining these structures and the inequitable distribution of power, resources and welfare they seem to have brought in their wake. 

 

Hon. Dennis Davis 

The Honorable Dennis Davis was educated at Herzlia School and Universities of Cape Town and Cambridge. He served as a judge at the High Court of Cape Town from 1998 to 2020 and as as judge president of the Competition Appeal Court from 1999 to 2020. Previously, he was a professor and director of the Centre of Applied Legal Studies at the University of Witwatersrand from 1990 to 1997. He has also served as an honorary professor at University of Cape Town, University of the Western Cape, and Wits, teaching tax, constitutional law, jurisprudence and competition law. and has held visiting professorial posts at Toronto, Melbourne, Harvard, NYU, Florida, Brown and Georgetown.   

Judge Davis served as chair of the Davis Tax Committee, as one of the drafters of the Competition Act of 1998 and the Companies Act of 2008 and as legal advisor to the Constitutional Assembly in which the South African Constitution was drafted. He is the author of 11 books and more than 200 articles in academic journals. He is the host of “Judge for Yourself,” a South African television program on current political and economic issues. 

Judge Davis is also a very anxious Manchester United supporter. 

  

Sukti Dhital ’06 

Sukti Dhital is the executive director of the Bernstein Institute for Human Rights at NYU Law, the only law school-based center focusing on legal empowerment research, advocacy and education. She also serves as a supervising attorney with the Global Justice Clinic, where she oversees legal empowerment projects spanning criminal legal system and immigrant rights. Previously, Ms. Dhital was the executive director and co-founder of Nazdeek, a legal empowerment organization that works closely with indigenous and Dalit women to advance human rights through a community-driven approach. Prior to Nazdeek, she was the director of the Reproductive Rights Unit at the Human Rights Law Network, India, and assisted in securing landmark social and economic rights judgments. She has also worked at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Reproductive Freedom Project and as an appellate litigation associate. Ms. Dhital received her BA from the University of Michigan and her JD from Northeastern University School of Law. 

  

Veena Dubal 

Veena Dubal is a professor of law at UC Hastings College of the Law. Her research focuses on the intersection of law, technology and precarious work. Within this broad frame, she uses empirical methodologies and critical theory to understand (1) the impact of digital technologies and emerging legal frameworks on the lives of workers, (2) the co-constitutive influences of law and work on identity, and (3) the role of law and lawyers in solidarity movements. 

Professor Dubal has been cited by the California Supreme Court, and her scholarship has been published in top-tier law reviews and peer-reviewed journals. Based on over a decade of ethnographic and historical study, Professor Dubal is currently writing a manuscript (“Driving Freedom, Navigating Neoliberalism”) on how five decades of shifting technologies and emergent regulatory regimes changed the everyday lives and work experiences of ride-hail drivers in San Francisco. Complementing her academic scholarship, Professor Dubal’s writings have also been published in The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian and Slate, and her commentary and research on the intersections of technology, low-wage work and organizing (particularly in the so-called “sharing” or platform economy) are regularly featured both in the local and national media and in a number of documentaries. 

  

Richard Michael Fischl  

Michael Fischl is professor of law at the University of Connecticut School of Law. He began his legal career as an attorney with the National Labor Relations Board, where he worked for half a decade to secure reinstatement and backpay for unlawfully discharged union organizers.  The agency’s mission took a dodgy turn when Reagan came to town, and in the early 1980s he sought sanctuary at the University of Miami, where he taught until the move to Connecticut in 2006.  

Professor Fischl’s research interests focus on labor law and legal theory, and highlights of his many mostly happy years as a legal academic include active participation in a faculty group supporting the ultimately successful effort of the SEIU to organize the custodial and landscaping workers at the University of Miami; a visiting professorship at Yale, which has been making do with labor law visitors since Jack Getman left in the mid-1980s and finally got to the F’s in 2011; and, together with Karl Klare and Lucy Williams — as well as Joanne Conaghan and Kerry Rittich — service as co-secretary of INTELL, an international network of progressive labor scholars and practitioners that produced a series of extraordinary conferences and publications in the 1990s and early 2000s. He is co-author with Jeremy Paul of Getting to Maybe — a/k/a “Critical Legal Studies Meets the Law Exam” — and much of his recent work has focused on the legacies of cls in the law school classroom. 

  

Peter Gabel 

Peter Gabel was president of New College of California and a law professor at New College’s public interest law school for more than 30 years. He was an original member of the critical legal studies movement. His most recent book, The Desire for Mutual Recognition: Social Movements and the Dissolution of the False Self, was nominated for the Kirkus Prize as Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year by Routledge Press.  

Most recently, Professor Gabel co-founded and now co-chairs the Project for Integrating Spirituality, Law, and Politics, a nationwide group of law teachers, lawyers and law students who aspire to transforming our adversarial, rights-based legal culture so that law itself can become an important vehicle for creating a more loving and compassionate world. He also holds a PhD in psychology from the Wright Institute in Berkeley, is a licensed psychotherapist in California, and seeks to emphasize in all his writings the longing of all human beings for authentic mutual recognition and the importance of spiritually informed social activism in creating a world in which that longing is more fully realized. 

  

Richard Griffin Jr. ’81 

Richard Griffin, Jr. is of counsel at the Washington, DC, law firm of Bredhoff & Kaiser, where he represents unions, employee benefit funds, labor-management cooperation trusts and individuals, and serves as a mediator. He has also taught labor law, and is the co-author, with Seth Harris, Anne Lofaso, Charlotte Garden and Joseph Slater of Modern Labor Law in the Private and Public Sectors: Cases and Materials (3rd ed., Carolina Academic Press, 2021).  

Prior to joining Bredhoff & Kaiser, from November 4, 2013, through October 31, 2017, Mr. Griffin was the Senate-confirmed general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), overseeing the prosecution of unfair labor practice cases and the defense of the board’s decisions in court, culminating in his arguing Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis on the Board’s behalf in the U.S. Supreme Court. Before becoming NLRB general counsel, Mr. Griffin served as a recess-appointed NLRB board member from January 2012 through August 2013. From 1983 through his appointment as a board member, Mr. Griffin worked in the legal department of the International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE); from September 1994 until January 2012, he was the IUOE’s general counsel. While IUOE general counsel, Mr. Griffin was on the AFL-CIO Lawyers Advisory Panel and was a member of the board of directors of the AFL-CIO Lawyers Coordinating Committee. From 1981 to 1983, Mr. Griffin served as staff counsel to two NLRB board members. He is a fellow of the College of Labor and Employment Lawyers and of the American Bar Foundation. He graduated from Yale College (BA 1977) and Northeastern University Law School (JD 1981). 

 

James Hackney 

James Hackney was appointed dean of Northeastern University School of Law on July 1, 2018; he joined the faculty in 1992. From 2013 to 2015, he served as the law school’s associate dean for entrepreneurial programs and research support. In that role, he launched the law school’s first online programs for non-lawyers, which focus on the increasing importance of law and regulations in such fields as health, human resources, intellectual property, privacy and compliance. After Northeastern President Aoun tapped him to become his chief of staff in 2016, Dean Hackney managed the president’s staff and worked closely with his top leadership team to devise university strategy. He was deeply involved in developing Northeastern 2025, the university’s academic plan. He also co-chairs the Presidential Council on Diversity and Inclusion. 

Dean Hackney teaches and conducts research in the areas of intellectual history, torts, corporate finance, corporations, the mutual fund industry, law and economics, and theories of race in America. He is the author of two acclaimed books: Under Cover of Science: American Legal-Economic Theory and the Quest for Objectivity (Duke University Press, 2007) and Legal Intellectuals in Conversation: Reflections on the Construction of Contemporary American Legal Theory (New York University Press, 2012). 

 

Lisa Jaicks 

Lisa Jaicks was a waitress who, with her co-workers, organized her shop and then became a union organizer for more than 35 years with the Hotel and Restaurant Workers Union (Unite Here), She remains an activist with her union. 

  

Duncan Kennedy 

Duncan Kennedy is the Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence, Emeritus, at Harvard Law School. He was a founding member of the Critical Legal Studies movement. Professor Kennedy received an AB in economics from Harvard College in 1964 and in 1970 earned an LLB from Yale Law School. After completing a clerkship with US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, Professor Kennedy joined the Harvard Law School faculty in 1971 as an assistant professor, becoming a full professor in 1976.  

Professor Kennedy has taught contracts, torts, property, trusts, the history of legal thought, low-income housing law and policy, Israel/Palestine legal issues, the globalization of law and legal thought, and the politics of private law. His well-known publications have contributed to legal and social theory, the history of legal thought, legal semiotics, law and economics, contract law and legal education. 

  

Theodore Lieverman ’78 

Ted Lieverman is a retired lawyer whose legal career focused on representing labor unions and unorganized workers. He also represented class action plaintiffs, including employee benefit plans suing pharmaceutical companies for the high cost of prescription drugs. Mr. Lieverman is a graduate of Vassar College and Northeastern University School of Law. He learned basic labor law as a student in the first course Karl Klare taught at Northeastern in 1976, and later worked as Professor Klare’s research assistant. Since 2011, Mr. Lieverman has devoted most of his attention to documentary photography. He lives in Philadelphia. 

  

Amaya Marin 

Amaya Alvez Marín is a lawyer, academic, human rights activist and defender, and a representative of the Region del Biobio in the Chilean Constituent Convention. She conducted the coordination of the Convention’s Regulations Commission, which drafted the actual Convention Regulation. Ms. Marín was elected through the electoral pact “Apruebo Dignidad,” integrated by the Frente Amplio parties and independents, in her case, the party “Revolucion Democrática.” 

Professor Marín holds a PhD in law from York University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and is a full professor at the University of Concepcion, Chile. She is a researcher in the Center for Water Resources for Agriculture and Mining (CHRIAM; in Spanish), part of an interdisciplinary research group in human rights and democracy of the University of Concepcion. Through her academic and scientific research work she has written a number of papers on constitutional law, human rights, water regulations and indigenous people rights, for national and international academic publications. Professor Marín also works along with other colleges in a legal advocacy and human rights promotion organization called “Colectiva – Justicia en Derechos Humanos,” mainly on issues related to environmental and indigenous law. 

Professor Marín’s work in promoting Chile’s constitutional change is more than a decade long. She has participated in different civil society initiatives in this regard: “Nueva Constitución para Chile (2013), “Puentes para una nueva constitución” (2016), “Red de Constitucionalistas” (2019 to the date) and the electoral campaign to initiate the actual constituent process “Que Chile decida” (Let Chile Decide).  

For more information about Professor Marín, visit www.amayaalvez.cl. 

  

Frank I. Michelman 

Frank I. Michelman is Robert Walmsley University Professor, Emeritus, at Harvard University, where he taught from 1963 to 2012. He has published widely in the fields of constitutional law and theory, comparative constitutionalism, property law and theory, and local government law. Professor Michelman is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a past president (1994-95) of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy. He has served in the past on the committee of directors for the annual Prague Conference on Philosophy and the Social Sciences, the board of directors of the United States Association of Constitutional Law and the national advisory board of the American Constitution Society.  

In January 1995, and again in January 1996, Professor Michelman served (along with Karl Klare) as a co-organizer and co-leader of the Judges’ Conferences sponsored by the Centre on Applied Legal Studies of the University of the Witwatersrand, devoted to matters of constitutional law in South Africa. Since then he has written extensively and taught on the topic of South African constitutionalism. 

 

Jeremy Paul 

Jeremy Paul served as dean of Northeastern University School of Law from 2012 until June 2018. He teaches Constitutional Law, Property and Jurisprudence, and co-directs the University’s Media Advocacy program. A 1978 graduate of Princeton University, he received his law degree from Harvard in 1981. Before coming to Northeastern, Professor Paul served for 23 years on the faculty of the University of Connecticut School of Law, where he was dean and the Thomas F. Gallivan, Jr. Professor of Real Property Law from 2007 until 2012. 

Professor Paul’s scholarly work has been published in the Texas Law Review, Michigan Law Review, University of Southern California Law Review and Washington Monthly. He is the co-author of the best-selling book, Getting to Maybe: How to Excel on Law School Exams, and author of a widely used introduction to legal reasoning, “A Bedtime Story,” published in the Virginia Law Review. He is a frequent contributor to the legal and popular press, with articles appearing in the New York Law Journal, the ABA Journal, The National Law Journal, The Hartford Courant and other outlets. 

 

Sanjukta Paul  

Sanjukta Paul is an assistant professor of law at Wayne State University. Prior to transitioning to academics, she practiced law for several years on behalf of workers, labor unions and civil rights plaintiffs and earned her JD from Yale. She has written widely in law reviews and elsewhere on antitrust, labor and the relationship between them. Broadly speaking, Professor Paul studies how law organizes economic coordination — currently focusing particularly on labor and antitrust — and how these legal choices promote or undermine broader social aims. She is currently completing a book, Solidarity in the Shadow of Antitrust: Labor and the Legal Idea of Competition (Cambridge University Press), which reinterprets key aspects of the development of antitrust law in relation to labor and workers. Her academic articles and essays have also appeared or will appear in the Michigan Law Review, Yale Law Journal, the UCLA Law Review, Law & Contemporary Problems, and the Berkeley Journal of Employment & Labor Law, among others. Her paper “The Enduring Ambiguities of Antitrust Liability for Worker Collective Action” was recognized with the Jerry S. Cohen Memorial Fund’s award for the best antitrust scholarship of 2016 (category prize). She co-edited a comparative and international law volume entitled Labor in Competition Law (Cambridge University Press), due out in 2022. 

  

Rachel Rosenbloom 

Rachel Rosenbloom is a professor of law and associate dean for experiential education at Northeastern University School of Law. She teaches and writes in the area of immigration law and policy. Her recent scholarship has focused on the intersection of criminal law and immigration law, the possibilities and limits of transnational legal advocacy in advancing the rights of deportees, and the role of race and immigration in the historical development of US citizenship law. 

Prior to joining the law faculty, Professor Rosenbloom was a fellow at the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Boston College, where she was the supervising attorney for the center’s Post-Deportation Human Rights Project. She has been widely quoted in the media on the wrongful detention and deportation of US citizens and permanent residents and testified on this subject at a 2008 congressional hearing before the House Subcommittee on Immigration. She has taught as an adjunct professor at Bentley University and is currently an affiliated faculty member of the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Boston College. Professor Rosenbloom’s legal career includes practicing union-side labor law at the Boston firm Segal Roitman. 

 

Jayshree Satpute  

Recognized by UK’s The Guardian as one of the World's Top 100 Inspiring Women, Jayshree Satpute is a human rights lawyer and co-founder of Nazdeek. Ms. Satpute has more than 15 years of experience advocating at the Supreme Court of India and various high courts. Her ground-breaking work has focused on the realization of the rights of most marginalized groups in India though innovating approaches such as grassroots legal education and strategic litigation.  

Ms. Satpute has extensively worked on various issues including maternal health, housing rights and other socio-economic rights of urban slum dwellers. Her work with Adivasi tea plantation workers spans across labor rights, sexual and reproductive rights, housing rights and the right to a living wage amongst others. She also has extensive experience in working on rights of refugees and other displaced persons, with a focus on women and children. 

  

Elizabeth Schneider 

Elizabeth Schneider is the Rose L. Hoffer Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School. Professor Schneider teaches and writes in the fields of gender law, domestic violence and federal civil litigation. She is the author of Battered Women and Feminist Lawmaking (Yale University Press 2000), which won the 2000 Association of American Publishers Professional Scholarly Publishing Award in Law, co-editor of Women and the Law Stories(Foundation Press, 2011) (with Stephanie M. Wildman), and co-author of the law school casebook Domestic Violence and the Law: Theory and Practice (3rd ed., Foundation Press, 2013) (with Cheryl Hanna, Emily J. Sack and Judith G. Greenberg).  

Professor Schneider graduated from Bryn Mawr College cum laude with honors in political science, was a Leverhulme Fellow at the London School of Economics, where she received an M.Sc. in political sociology, and holds a JD from New York University Law School, where she was an Arthur Garfield Hays Civil Liberties Fellow. She clerked for the late US District Court Judge Constance Baker Motley of the Southern District of New York. She has also been visiting professor of law at Harvard and Columbia law schools. She is the founding director of the Edward V. Sparer Public Interest Law Fellowship Program at Brooklyn Law School. 

  

MacKenzie Speer ’20 

MacKenzie Speer is an Equal Justice Works Fellow at Legal Aid Chicago. She represents tenants impacted by gender-based and community violence in evictions and works to enforce their rights to safe and discrimination-free housing. In many cases, this includes working with clients to navigate the immediate, civil-legal consequences of a family member’s contact with the criminal-legal system. She is a 2020 graduate of Northeastern University School of Law, where she was a Public Interest Law Scholar. Before law school, she advocated for expanding access to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and other public benefits with the economic security team at the Shriver Center on Poverty Law. 

 

Emily Spieler 

Emily Spieler, an expert in labor and employment law, is the Edwin W. Hadley Professor of Law at Northeastern University School of Law. From 2002 until 2012, she was dean of the School of Law. Professor Spieler focuses on the challenges faced by low-wage workers and ways in which workers may exercise voice, with an emphasis on issues of retaliation and whistleblowing. She has particular interest and expertise in areas relating to workplace injuries and illnesses and the problems faced by injured workers. 

Professor Spieler has served as chair of the US Department of Labor Whistleblower Protection Advisory Committee, of the US Department of Energy Worker Advocacy Advisory Committee regarding implementation of the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act of 2000, and of the Scientific Advisory Committee for the Institute for Work and Health in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, as well as serving as a member of numerous national committees relating to workplace safety and compensation for occupational injuries. During the winter of 2008-2009, she was a member of President Obama’s transition team for the Department of Labor. Professor Spieler is an elected fellow to the Pound Civil Justice Institute, the Collegium Ramazzini, the American Bar Foundation and the College of Workers’ Compensation Lawyers, and is an elected member of the National Academy of Social Insurance. 

 

Lucy Williams 

Lucy Williams is a professor of law at Northeastern University School of Law. An internationally recognized authority on welfare law and low-wage labor, Professor Williams focuses on the dependency created in low-wage labor relationships, and how the political rhetoric connecting "dependency" with receipt of welfare has diverted attention from the structural issues within low-wage labor markets. She has a long and impressive record as both an academic and a litigator in the areas of unemployment insurance, Social Security and related welfare programs. In 2018, she was selected for a Fulbright Specialist award. Under the Fulbright auspices, and in partnership with Wuhan University School of Law in China, she taught courses on social and economic rights and worked with NGOs. 

In recent years, Professor Williams has expanded her work to address issues of global poverty and the justiciability of social and economic rights. She currently convenes the International Social and Economic Rights Project (iSERP), a group of international academics, judges and activists working to encourage and develop critical and transformative thinking about SER and SER-based legal strategies. She is also faculty director of the law school’s Center for Public Interest Advocacy and Collaboration and co-director of its Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy. 

 

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Event Planning Committee:

Jeremy Paul, Professor of Law and Former Dean
Lucy Williams, Professor of Law and Faculty Director, Center for Public Interest Advocacy and Collaboration
Libby Adler ’94, Professor of Law and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Sponsored by:
Barnard Iglitzin & Lavitt
Leonard Carder
Pyle Rome Ehrenberg
Segal Roitman
Sandulli Grace