ABOUT US

Michele R. Pistone, JD, LLM
Professor Michele Pistone is Faculty Director of the Institute. Professor Pistone speaks and publishes regularly on migration and asylum law, access to justice, technology, and on topics related to legal education, including online and hybrid teaching, student-centered course design, and formative assessment. She is presently an expert advisor to the Holy See Mission to the United Nations on human rights and migration, a Fellow at the Center for Migration Studies in New York, and a Fellow at the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System. Pistone was also a Fulbright scholar at the University of Malta, where she helped to launch Malta’s first clinical education program in the law faculty. Professor Pistone has been a law professor at Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law since 1999, and founded the law school’s first in-house Clinical Program and founded and directed the Clinic for Asylum, Refugee and Emigrant Services (CARES) for close to 20 years.

In 2019 she was awarded a J.M.K. Innovation Prize to launch the first-ever online university-based certificate program to train non-lawyers to become immigrant advocates and Accredited Representatives authorized to provide legal representation to immigrants in immigration courts and before US Citizenship and Immigration Services.  Her award-winning program, Villanova Interdisciplinary Immigration Studies Training for Advocates (VIISTA), is offered through the College of Professional Studies. Professor Pistone is also partnering on the Colibrí Fellowship with The Resurrection Project in Chicago, Illinois, and Innovation Law Lab in Portland, Oregon. She was a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Resident in March 2024. During her residency, Professor Pistone wrote a whitepaper, Expanding Immigrant Justice Through A Movement for New Legal Careers, setting out a 5-year strategic plan for fostering an enabling environment to support growth of the field of immigration justice professionals and Accredited Representatives.
FACULTY PROFILE

In her role as Associate Director, External Affairs, Robyn Lieberman works with non-profit service providers, advocates, researchers, students, government officials and other stakeholders to advance the institute's vision of scaling the Department of Justice-Recognized Organizations and Accredited Representatives program and creating impactful opportunities for professionals and volunteers in immigration legal services to help address the representation crisis.

Lieberman led the first national comprehensive study of DOJ-Recognized Organizations and Accredited Representatives in 2024, in partnership with the Center for Migration Studies of New York. She also co-leads the Immigration Legal Services Defense Advocacy Working Group and is a member of the Recognition and Accreditation Working Group, The Ready to Stay Coalition’s Capacity Building section and the National Immigration Appropriations Collaborative.

Lieberman has spent most of her career working at the intersection of human rights, immigration and advocacy. Prior to joining Villanova, she was Senior Director of Advocacy and Strategy at Human Rights First in Washington, D.C., and served as a senior legislative advisor to two members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. She also worked with migrants directly in Thailand, Russia, Israel, and Greece. Lieberman has also held senior roles in education, philanthropy and development.

Lieberman holds a BA in Russian Literature from the University of Pennsylvania and has graduate certificates in Emergency Response and Management from The George Washington University School of Engineering and Applied Science.