Faculty & Staff

Caitlin Barry

Associate Professor of Law
Director, Farmworker Legal Aid Clinic (FLAC)
Co-Director, Community Interpreter Internship Program
Director of the Clinical Program

Caitlin Barry is a community lawyer whose work focuses on migrant justice, gender self-determination and grassroots empowerment. Caitlin directs the Farmworker Legal Aid Clinic, where she teaches the clinic seminar and supervises students advocates in immigration and employment matters and collaborates with local community-based organizations on advocacy and outreach projects. She also teaches Race and the Law. Caitlin joined the Villanova faculty in 2012 as a Reuchlein Clinical Teaching Fellow and became the Director of the Farmworker Clinic in 2015. From 2011-2012, Caitlin supervised the Temple Immigration Law Clinic at Nationalities Service Center (NSC) as an adjunct professor. Prior to her clinical teaching, Caitlin served as a staff attorney at NSC, specializing in deportation defense for individuals targeted by the criminal system, and from 2007 to 2012 she was also the Immigration Specialist at the Defender Association of Philadelphia, a position she created with a 2007 post-graduate fellowship from the Berkeley Law Foundation. She is a graduate of the New College of Florida and Temple Law, where she was awarded the Beth Cross Memorial Award for Public Interest Service and the Leonard Sigal Memorial Award for Academic Excellence in Criminal Law.

Michael Campbell

Director, Interdisciplinary Mental and Physical Health Law Clinic

Michael Campbell joined the Faculty in 2008 following three decades as a public interest attorney. Prior to coming to Villanova, he directed the Pennsylvania Health Law Project ("PHLP"), an organization that he co-founded in 1993 to represent low income Pennsylvanians seeking access to quality health care and services. He litigated individual and class actions in the state and federal courts, led community education efforts around legal aspects of Medicare, Medicaid, and Long-term Care across Pennsylvania, and represented groups in administrative rulemaking campaigns before the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and various departments of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.  He has testified on numerous occasions before committees of the federal and state legislature.

Professor Campbell is a graduate of Villanova University and Temple Law School. He teaches the Health Care and the Law course and is the director of the Interdisciplinary Mental and Physical Health Law Clinic, which blends the talents of graduate nurses from Villanova’s College of Nursing and Villanova law students in litigating disability, guardianship, medical necessity and other cases at the intersection of law and medicine on behalf of poor clients.

Deeya Haldar

Visiting Assistant Professor
Director, Civil Justice Clinic

Deeya Haldar, Visiting Assistant Professor of Law, is the Director of the Civil Justice Clinic (“CJC”). The CJC works with low-income clients needing legal assistance in the areas of family, housing, consumer and employment law. Professor Haldar previously served as an adjunct professor for the Drexel Civil Litigation Field Clinic at Philadelphia Legal Assistance, working with law students to represent domestic violence survivors in Philadelphia’s Family Court. Professor Haldar also served as a supervisor of the Family Law Unit at Philadelphia Legal Assistance.  Before Philadelphia Legal Assistance, Professor Haldar worked as a law guardian at The Legal Aid Society of New York and clerked for Justice Carolyn Berger of the Delaware Supreme Court.  Professor Haldar also performed pro bono service as a volunteer attorney with the Support Center for Child Advocates and Philadelphia VIP. She earned her BS in Human Development and Family Studies from Cornell University and her JD from New York University School of Law.

Frances Kreimer

Visiting Assistant Professor 
Director, Clinic for Asylum, Refugee, and Emigrant Services (CARES)

Frances Kreimer is the Clinical Teaching Fellow for the Clinic for Asylum, Refugee, and Emigrant Services (CARES), in which students develop core advocacy skills by representing asylum seekers in immigration proceedings.  

Before joining Villanova, Kreimer served as the co-director of the Deportation Defense and Legal Advocacy Program at Dolores Street Community Services in San Francisco, providing direct representation in removal proceedings in the San Francisco Immigration Court, before the Board of Immigration Appeals, and in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. She also represented the organization in amicus briefing and impact litigation, including FOIA and habeas litigation in the Northern District of California. Prior to Dolores Street, Kreimer served as a law clerk to Justice Goodwin Liu of the Supreme Court of California and to Judge Lucy Koh of the Northern District of California. She holds a JD from New York University School of Law and a BA in Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University.

Michele R. Pistone

Professor of Law
Director, Clinic for Asylum, Refugee and Emigrant Services (CARES)   

Professor Pistone is creating the Villanova Interdisciplinary Immigration Studies Training for Advocates (VIISTA) Program in conjunction with the College of Professional Studies through the 2020-2021 academic year.

Professor Pistone is a national authority on immigration law and procedure. Her work has focused on issues impacting asylum seekers and refugees. She is a Board Member of Pennsylvania Immigration Resource Center (PIRC), a member of the Executive Committee of the AALS International Human Rights Section, and as a consultant to American Law Institute-American Bar Association Continuing Legal Education, she authored an award-winning training video for lawyers representing asylum seekers. Professor Pistone has been a clinical teacher for several years and directs the Clinical Program. She also serves on the ABA's Committee on Clinical and Skills Education.  She earned her J.D. From St. John’s University School of Law and her LL.M. from the Georgetown University Law Center.

Christine Speidel

Assistant Professor of Law
Director of the Federal Tax Clinic

Christine Speidel directs the Federal Tax Clinic. In the Clinic, she teaches students to practice law by representing needy members of Villanova’s neighboring communities in federal tax disputes. Professor Speidel frequently speaks and writes on issues affecting low-income taxpayers, particularly related to health care reform. Her research interests lie in the intersection of poverty law with tax law and tax procedure. Professor Speidel is a contributor to the Procedurally Taxing blog and an editor of the practice manual Effectively Representing Your Client Before the IRS. Speidel is active in the American Bar Association Section of Taxation, and she is the immediate past chair of the Section’s Pro Bono and Tax Clinics Committee.

Prior to her appointment at Villanova, Professor Speidel practiced law at Vermont Legal Aid. She directed the Vermont Low-Income Taxpayer Clinic and was a staff attorney for Vermont Legal Aid's Office of the Health Care Advocate as well as the Poverty Law Project. She represented low-income individuals in tax, health care, domestic violence, and public benefits matters, and also advocated for systemic policy changes.

Komal Vaidya

Assistant Professor of Law
Director, Clinic for Law and Entrepreneurship

Komal Vaidya joined the Villanova faculty in July of 2019 as the Director of the Clinic for Law and Entrepreneurship. Clinic students handle transactional and business law matters that support community driven development. Client matters may include incorporation, entity choice, structuring, applying for tax exempt status, transactional drafting, land use, and policy work.

Professor Vaidya is a community lawyer who has partnered with grassroots organizations on economic development issues. Prior to joining Villanova, she served as a Clinical Fellow and Acting Director in the University of Baltimore School of Law (UB) Community Development Clinic. There, she represented democratically governed organizations, nonprofits, and social enterprises on a broad array of transactional and business law issues. In addition to supervising cases, she involved students in coalition work to advocate for water equity in Baltimore.

Professor Vaidya also provided transactional support to community organizers and manufactured housing residents in the Denver Metro area. Specifically, she provided expertise that enabled communities to form homeowners’ associations and use zoning law to halt displacement and promote community ownership of land. Further, while a staff attorney at the Lawyer’s Committee for Better Housing in Chicago, she collaborated with grassroots organizations on displacement related efforts.

In addition to her teaching experience at UB, she taught Lawyering Process at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law and was an Equal Justice Works Foreclosure Fellow in the University of Illinois College of Law Community Preservation Clinic. Her research interests focus on collective ownership, local political economies, and progressive property rights. She received her J.D. from the University of Miami and B.S. from the University of Illinois, Champaign Urbana. She is admitted to practice in Maryland, Colorado, and Illinois.

Andrea Meals

Senior Paralegal
Federal Tax Clinic

Andrea joined the Clinical Program in November of 2014 as a FLAC paralegal, and she moved to the Tax Clinic in January of 2015. Prior to coming to Villanova, Andrea worked for Cozen O’Connor, and Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath, LLP as a paralegal in their Corporate and Securities departments. In addition to her role as the Federal Tax Clinic paralegal, she is also the Senior Paralegal for the Clinic and oversees the administrative duties of running the Clinical Program. Andrea enjoys working with law students and helping low income clients.

Jennifer Jeffery

Paralegal

Civil Justice Clinic, Health Law Clinic and Clinic for Law and Entrepreneurship