Emily Blackshire Giel ’17

Emily Blackshire Giel ’17 Receives the 2024 Roaring10 Award

Emily Giel, a Bluffton resident and Hilton Head native, graduated from Clemson in 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in language and international health. She earned the Juris Doctor degree from the University of South Carolina School of Law in 2021.

While in law school Emily began working in the Richland County Public Defender’s Office and continued there after graduation. She represented more than 500 individuals in Columbia Municipal Court and collaborated with service providers across the Midlands to connect her clients with housing, transportation, health care, civil legal services, childcare and mental health resources.

In 2022, she received an Equal Justice Works Fellowship to serve as the housing justice attorney in the South Carolina Appleseed Legal Justice Center. She helped lead a collaborative effort to establish the Richland County Housing Court to address the needs of tenants at risk of being evicted from their homes.

In 2024, Emily joined Notre Dame University’s Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities. She helps state and local legislators across the country draft data-driven policy to reduce poverty. She spends her free time at the Coastal Discovery Museum in Hilton Head, where she creates social media content about everything from massive art installations to baby alligators.

Emily’s community service accomplishments range from creating the Paw Pantry student-to-student food bank as a Clemson undergraduate to helping refugees from multiple countries resettle in the Columbia area while she was in law school. She also founded a 2020-2021 newsletter and dialogue series called Unlearning Racism and served on the board of the Rainy Day Fund, a financial support nonprofit that pays fines, fees and other expenses for people impacted by the criminal legal system.

She and her husband, Taylor Edward Giel ’16 return to campus as often as possible.