ProfessorVillanova University
Michele Pistone is a Professor of Law at Villanova University. In 1999, she also founded the Law School’s in-house Clinical Program and founded and directed the Clinic for Asylum, Refugee and Emigrant Services (CARES). In August 2020, Professor Pistone launched the first-ever online certificate program to train immigrant advocates, VIISTA (Villanova Interdisciplinary Immigration Studies Training for Advocates), to provide legal representation to immigrants in immigration court and before the Department of Homeland Security. Pistone won the highly competitive, national JM Kaplan Innovation Prize in 2019 for her ground-breaking work designing and developing VIISTA.
Professor Pistone serves as an expert the Permanent Mission of Holy See to the United Nations and is the former associate editor of the Journal on Migration and Human Security, a publication of the Center for Migration Studies in New York, where she is a Fellow. Professor Pistone has also taught at Georgetown University Law Center, twice as a Visiting Professor at American University Washington College of Law and as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Malta.
Professor Pistone is the Founder of the AALS Section on Technology, Law and Legal Education and was awarded the Section’s inaugural Award in 2020. She is the winner of the 2020 Meyer Faculty Award in Innovation, Creativity and Entrepreneurship, the Sister Elizabeth Ann Seton Award from St. John’s University, and is an Adjunct Fellow with the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation. She is also a Fellow at the Institute for the Advancement of American Legal System’s (IAALS) Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers.
Pistone founded LegalEDweb, videos on law and law teaching have been viewed more than 1,000,000 times. She is a regular speaker at conferences on teaching, learning, assessment and learning outcomes and has taught hundreds of legal scholars to use technology in their teaching.