Law Dean Emily Spieler has been named to President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team.

Spieler, dean of the School of Law since 2002, will serve on the team reviewing the Department of Labor, until shortly before the Jan. 20 inauguration.

According to Obama’s Web site, www.change.gov, the teams will ensure that senior appointees have the information necessary to complete the confirmation process, lead their departments, and begin implementing signature policy initiatives immediately after they are sworn in.

Spieler, a leading authority on employment law and social insurance systems, formerly taught at West Virginia University’s College of Law. She had served as commissioner of the West Virginia Workers Compensation Fund and was West Virginia’s first deputy attorney general for civil rights, also serving on the state’s Human Rights Commission.

In the 1970s, she was a member of the Women’s Law Collective practice in Cambridge, Mass., and was a special assistant attorney general for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.

She spent a semester in Ireland as a Fulbright Scholar in 2001, and was honored with the West Virginia Martin Luther King Jr. Advocacy of Justice Award.

Spieler graduated from Harvard University and Yale Law School.