Komal Vaidya

Director, Clinic for Law & Entrepreneurship
Associate Professor of Law

Biography

Komal Vaidya joined the Villanova faculty in July of 2019 as the director of the Clinic for Law and Entrepreneurship. She teaches seminar and supervises student representation of community enterprises, including cooperatives, nonprofits and other small businesses.

Prior to joining Villanova, she served as a clinical fellow and acting director at the University of Baltimore School of Law (UB) Community Development Clinic. Under her supervision, students learned how transactional lawyers can support grassroots empowerment. In addition, she worked alongside coalitions to advocate for water equity and community land trusts in Baltimore.

Vaidya also provided transactional support to community organizers and manufactured housing residents in the Denver Metro area. Specifically, she helped promote community ownership of land through a mixture of land use and policy work. Further, while a staff attorney at the Lawyers’ Committee for Better Housing in Chicago, she collaborated with community 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 at the University of Illinois College of Law Community Preservation Clinic. Vaidya’s interests and presentations have focused on collective ownership, community lawyering and local political economies. She is admitted to practice in Pennsylvania and Illinois. Her publication, “Decommodify Cooperative Capital,” is forthcoming (May 2024) in Northeastern University Law Review (Volume 16, Issue 2).