Michele Pistone
Michele Pistone, JD, LLM (she/her) is the Faculty Director of the Strategic Initiative on Migration and Refugee Protection, a professor of law and creator and Founding Faculty Director of VIISTA, an online certificate program to train immigrant advocates. Before building VIISTA, Professor Pistone directed and taught the Clinic for Asylum, Refugee and Emigrant Services at Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law. She founded the Law School’s in-house Clinical Program in 1999. Through the CARES clinic, Professor Pistone and her students provided free legal services to hundreds of asylum seekers and represented them in immigration court and before the Department of Homeland Security. Over the last 20 years, she and her students have helped hundreds of asylum seekers and their families gain asylum protection in the United States. Professor Pistone is an internationally recognized expert on online legal education and a regular speaker on legal education, online and hybrid teaching, formative assessment and also on immigration and asylum. Her research focuses on technological innovations in the practice of law and in legal education, asylum and refugee law, immigration law, migration, clinical education, and Catholic social thought. She co-authored Disrupting Law School: how disruptive innovation is revolutionizing the legal world, a whitepaper for the Christensen Institute, which was republished in China and Germany, as well as many papers on technology, legal education and the practice of law. She is also co-author of a groundbreaking book entitled, Stepping Out of the Brain Drain: Applying Catholic Social Teaching in a New Era of Migration (Lexington Books 2007). She is a Fellow at the Center for Migration Studies, an immigration think tank, a Fellow at the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System, serves on the American Bar Association Outcomes and Assessment Committee and serves as an expert advisor on migration and human rights to the Holy See Mission to the United Nations.