Ronald Wheeler

Ronald Wheeler, affiliated faculty with the Boston University Institute for Global Sustainability (IGS), is a recognized leader in the area of legal research instruction having served in various law library management roles at law schools across the country. Wheeler has taught legal research in various contexts including in stand-alone 1L legal research courses, upper division courses, online, and in study abroad programs in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Linz, Austria. Wheeler also taught a course on US Legal Research at the East China University of Political Science and Law in Shanghai, China during the summer of 2012. Beyond legal research, Wheeler has taught seminars like Queer Legal Scholarship and Critical Race Theory. He will teach his newly developed course, Critical Legal Research, which is his current research interest, in the Spring of 2025.

Professor Wheeler’s scholarship focusing on legal research techniques, legal research instruction, and algorithm-driven search engines gained him national attention, and he is regularly called upon to speak about innovations in teaching. His work is well-known for addressing issues related to law library management; the role of the law library in legal education; and Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging; and Critical Legal Research. Wheeler penned several installments of Diversity Dialogues, a former feature in Law Library Journal which aimed to engage scholarly conversation on issues of diversity and inclusion in librarianship and the legal profession.

From 2016 to 2017, Associate Dean Wheeler served as president of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), becoming the first Black, male president of AALL. He was appointed to chair AALL’s Inclusion, Diversity & Equity Awareness Special Committee whose work from 2020 to 2022 resulted in the adoption by AALL of several of the Special Committee’s recommendations. Wheeler is a member of the Law Librarians of New England (LLNE), the International Association of Law Libraries (IALL), the British & Irish Association of Law Libraries (BIALL), the Canadian Association of Law Libraries/Association Canadienne Des Bibliothèques De Droit (CALL/ACBD), and the Association of Boston Law Librarians (ABLL). He serves on the executive boards of the New England Law Library Consortium (NELLCO), the Boston Academic Law Library Collective (BALLCO), and the Law Library Microform Consortium (LLMC).

Preferred pronouns: He, Him, His