Tenants Legal Hotline > Leadership Team

William Niebel

Tenants Advocacy Attorney and Adjunct Professor of Law Cornell Law School

(607) 254-2131

william.niebel@cornell.edu

William J. Niebel is the Tenants Advocacy Attorney and teaches the Tenants Advocacy Practicum as an Adjunct Professor of Law. He graduated from the University of South Dakota School of Law in 2005. After law school, he was admitted to the Iowa bar and began focusing on landlord-tenant law as a Staff Attorney at Iowa Legal Aid. In 2009, he prevailed in the Iowa Supreme Court, in the landmark case of War Eagle v. Plummer, 775 N.W.2d 714 (2009). That decision invalidated the Iowa statute that allowed certified mail notice of an eviction hearing, as a violation of due process. Bill moved to New York and worked at the Legal Aid Society of Northeastern New York for three years, in Albany and Saratoga Springs, defending many evictions in city, town, and village courts. He was then a Staff Attorney at Legal Services of Central New York, where he practiced housing law from 2015-2022. He is the author of The Process Due When Rent is Due: Residential Nonpayment Evictions After COVID-19, which was published in the N.Y. Real Property Law Journal in December 2021.