VISITING PROFESSORS

Visiting Assistant Professor of Law

Biography

Lev E. Breydo is a multi-disciplinary scholar focused on the impact of technological change and innovation on business organizations, market infrastructure and financial instruments. His research leverages sophisticated empirical methods to bring fresh insights to critical questions at the intersection of law, finance and technology.

Breydo’s scholarship has been published or is forthcoming in leading journals, including: the North Carolina Law Review, American Bankruptcy Law Journal, Seton Hall Law Review, Nevada Law Journal, UC Davis Law Review, San Diego Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Journal of Business Law and the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law.

Breydo previously practiced with two leading law firms, focusing on corporate and financial transactions, and worked at a financial technology company. He regularly serves as an advisor to start-ups, particularly in FinTech, CleanTech and LegalTech.

Breydo holds a JD, cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, where he served as articles editor of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review and an MBA from the Wharton School of Business, where he majored in Finance.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Law

Biography

Daniel Friedman is a visiting assistant professor at Villanova Law. He holds a BA in literature and languages from UT Austin, a JD from Yale, an MA in sinology from SOAS (University of London) and an MA in history from UC Berkeley, where he is also completing a PhD in history. His scholarship has primarily focused on economics, law and political legitimacy in early imperial and medieval China. His MA thesis concerned the legal regulation and physical production of privately produced coins in the Western Han dynasty (3rd-1st centuries BCE). His current research is a study of the bureaucracy, laws and legal theories of the medieval Northern Wei dynasty (4th-6th centuries CE), arguing that this ethnically Turkic regime left far greater impacts on Chinese law than is commonly acknowledged in a scholarship that often paints Chinese legal history as an unbroken tradition carried on by ethnically Han people. The results of this kind of study matter today, both for China and America, whose governments frequently rely on flawed understandings of ancient ethnic and legal history in promulgating major policies. China’s mass imprisonment and Sinicization campaign targeting at up to a million Uighurs in Xinjiang is one recent, dramatic example.

Friedman's research also explores the connections between these periods and historical and contemporary American law, particularly criminal law. From the 16th century on, Western visitors to China commented extensively on the country’s law and legal tradition, reporting their findings to an elite and then a broader public eager for insights into this foreign society and its rulers. While many of those impressions were initially positive, reports soured as European Enlightenment thinkers sought to define themselves against what they now saw as the barbarous and despotic Orient. American attitudes towards Chinese law from the 18th through at least the 20th century reflected this bias, and American criminal law continues to bear some of its marks.

Experience

• Legal Intern, Texas Defender Service (Summer 2013). Prepared memos on challenging death penalty convictions based on new scientific evidence. Reviewed many hours of recordings of police interrogations and legislative history. Visited clients on Death Row. 
• Legal Intern, Southern Center for Human Rights (Summer 2012). Prepared memos and motions on the right of confrontation, the admissibility of eyewitness identification expert testimony, and the failure of Alabama’s capital sentencing scheme to adequately narrow the class of death-eligible offenders. Observed numerous arraignments and other criminal court proceedings around the state, meeting with DAs, PDs, and judges. Represented a client before the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles. 
• Law Student Clinics: Landlord/Tenant; Capital Punishment; Detention and Human Rights; Criminal Justice Clinic. (Housing Court motion practice and oral argument; visits to clients in supermax prison; representation of felony defendants.)

Visiting Assistant Professor of Law

Santiago Mollis' research and teaching are located at the intersection of criminal law, criminology, and political theory. His scholarship engages both theoretical and practical lines of inquiry into how contemporary societies respond to crimes. In particular, his work aims to critically examine the normative grounds that inform the structure of the adversarial criminal process as well as the legitimate character of criminal punishment in its different manifestations. Mollis' research has been supported by the Fulbright Commission and the Max Planck Society.

Prior to joining Villanova Law,  Mollis collaborated with the Cornell Center on Death Penalty Worldwide and Cornell Law’s Gender Justice Clinic. In addition, he clerked for the Public Prosecutor’s Office within the Federal Criminal Appellate Court in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and worked as a teaching assistant at the Universidad de Palermo and Universidad de Buenos Aires. He obtained his bachelor of laws degree from Universidad de San Andrés in Argentina and holds a JSD and LLM from Cornell Law School. 

Visiting Assistant Professor of Law

John Oberdiek is a distinguished professor at Rutgers Law School. He writes and teaches in torts and tort theory, private law theory generally, as well as legal, political and moral philosophy, and has won awards for both his scholarship and teaching. He is a graduate of Middlebury College, and studied philosophy and law as a post-graduate at Oxford, NYU, and the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty in 2004, he practiced law at Arnold & Porter in Washington, DC.

Oberdiek has presented his work widely in colloquia, including at Yale, Harvard, and Penn, and at major conferences, including Kings College London's Moral Values and Private Law conference, Northwestern's Society for the Theory of Ethics and Politics conference, the North American Workshop in Private Law Theory, and the Analytic Legal Philosophy Conference. He is a past chair of the AALS's sections on both Jurisprudence and Scholarship. He has been a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton as well as a visiting professor at the University of Graz, Austria and Middlebury College. He served for two years as acting dean and then acting co-dean, helping to lead the merger that created Rutgers Law School, following a two-year term as vice dean.   

In addition, Oberdiek is associate graduate faculty in the Rutgers-New Brunswick Philosophy Department, a faculty affiliate of the Rutgers Center for Population-Level Bioethics, and a director of the Rutgers Institute for Law and Philosophy, under whose auspices he has organized several major conferences. He is also co-editor of the peer-reviewed professional journal Law and Philosophy, co-editor of the biennial series of articles Oxford Studies in Private Law Theory as well as the Oxford Private Law Theory book series, a member of the editorial board of Legal Theory, a fellow of the American Bar Foundation and both a member of the American Law Institute and an Adviser to the ALI's Restatement (Fourth) of Property.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Law & Director of the Health Law Clinic

Jacqueline Penrod joins Villanova as a visiting assistant professor and director of the Health Law Clinic. Penrod is particularly focused on the ways in which public health and education policies play a role in perpetuating health and income inequity. She brings a decade professional experience in the healthcare industry in addition to nearly fifteen years of legal practice in managed healthcare, healthcare compliance, and the legal issues surrounding healthcare data interchange. Penrod is a graduate of Temple University’s Beasley School of Law, and holds an MBA from Temple University.  Her legal professional experience includes two years of service as a law clerk in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania with the Honorable Gene E.K. Pratter, private practice at Duane Morris, LLP and Reed Smith, LLP, in-house practice as Senior Counsel for the AmeriHealth Caritas Family of Companies, as well as eight years of teaching undergraduate students health policy and law at an open-access undergraduate institution. Her experiences in the healthcare industry span perspectives of patients, doctors, facilities, and insurers. In addition to advocacy and teaching, she is pursuing an M.Ed. focused on adult learning and global change in an international cohort program at the University of British Columbia.

Scarpa Distinguished Visiting Professor of Entrepreneurship

Biography

Gregg Polsky is the Francis Shackelford Distinguished Professor in Taxation Law at the University of Georgia School of Law. He teaches and writes in the areas of federal income taxation and business law. Polsky's recent articles on private equity and venture capital tax strategies, corporate transactions and executive compensation have appeared in leading academic law reviews and professional tax journals. In addition to teaching at the University of Georgia, he has taught as a visiting professor at the law schools of New York University, Northwestern University and Duke University. During the 2007-08 academic year, Polsky served as the professor in residence in the Internal Revenue Service Office of Chief Counsel.  Before becoming a law professor, he practiced tax law in the Miami office of White & Case LLP. Polsky is as a Fellow of the American College of Tax Counsel. He received his JD and LLM in tax from the University of Florida Levin College of Law.

Experience

• University of Georgia School of Law - Francis Shackelford Distinguished Professor in Taxation Law
• University of North Carolina School of Law - Willie Person Magnum Professor of Law
• Florida State University College of Law - Sheila M. McDevitt Professor of Law
• Northwestern University, New York University, Duke University, and the University of Florida - Visiting Professor
• University of Minnesota Law School - Associate Professor and Professor of Law
• University of Minnesota Law School - Associate Professor of Law
• IRS Office of Chief Counsel in Washington, D.C - Professor in Residence
• Dorsey & Whitney LLP, Minneapolis, MN - Of Counsel
• White & Case, Miami, FL - Associate

Visiting Assistant Professor of Law

Biography

Kibrom Teweldebirhan is a visiting assistant professor of law at Villanova Law and a research fellow at Harvard Law School East Asian Legal Studies Program. Before joining Villanova Law, Teweldebirhan was a visiting scholars coordinator at Harvard Law School East Asian Legal Studies. At Villanova Law, he teaches courses on race and international law and contracts.

Teweldebirhan received a doctoral degree (SJD) from Harvard Law School in 2022. He wrote a doctoral thesis entitled “Labor after the Developmental State: Law, State, and Chinese State Enterprises on the African Copperbelt for his SJD. By drawing from ethnographic and archival resources, Teweldebirhan examined the development of Zambia’s labor law in the context of Zambia’s transition to a market economy and the globalization of mining companies from mainland China to Zambia. His ongoing research includes a comparative study of labor law and economic development with a focus on the experience of China, Zambia and Tanzania during their transition from a socialist to a free-market economy and on the history of legal thought and economic development in postcolonial Africa.

Teweldebirhan's teaching and research interests include international law, race and international law, law and economic development, Chinese law and legal thought and legal thought in colonial and postcolonial Africa. He is happy to advise students who are interested in those topics or topics that have comparative or international dimensions.  

Teweldebirhan received his LLB from the University of Asmara and LLM degrees from Wuhan University and Harvard Law School. After finishing his first law degree, Teweldebirhan worked as a teaching assistant and lecturer in law in Eritrea.

Experience

• Harvard Law School East Asian Legal Studies Program, East Asian Legal Studies Program - Visiting Scholars Coordinator
• Harvard Law School - Gradate Program Fellow, LL.M. Advisor
• Weatherhead Center for International Affairs - Graduate Student Fellow
• Harvard Law School - Cravath Fellow
• Harvard Law School East Asian Legal Studies Program - Research Fellow
• Harvard Law School - Summer Research Fellowship
• College of Arts and Social Sciences, Eritrea - Lecturer on Law
• College of Arts and Social Sciences, Eritrea - Graduate Assistant
• University of Asmara - Teaching Assistant
• High Court, Asmara, Eritrea - Law Clerk

Visiting Professor

Biography

Jane K. Winn is a professor at the University of Washington School of Law in Seattle, WA. Winn is a leading international authority on the impact of globalization and technological innovation on contract and commercial law.  She is a member of the American Law Institute and in 2008 and in 2016, received Fulbright Research Grants to study the impact of technology innovation on commercial law in China. She has been a member of the Peking University Global Law School Faculty since 2018.  In 2022, she completed a master's degree in Human-Centered Design and Engineering at the University of Washington College of Engineering.

In spring 2024, Winn is visiting at Villanova Law, and in 2022-2023, she was a visiting faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. She has also been a visiting faculty member at the University of California-Berkeley, Peking University and Tsinghua University in China, Sciences Po (l'Institut d'études politiques de Paris) and Université Jean Moulin Lyon III in France, University of Melbourne in Australia, Chulalongkorn University in Thailand and National Law University-Odisha in India. 

Her current research interests include electronic commerce law developments in the United States, the European Union, China and India and the impact of regulation on innovation and competition on electronic commerce law and practice. She is co-author of the treatise Law of Electronic Commerce and the casebook Electronic Commerce. 

Experience

• Professor, University of Washington School of Law (Seattle, WA)
• Professor, Dedman Law School, Southern Methodist University (Dallas, TX), 1989 - 2002
• Attorney, Shearman & Sterling (New York, NY), 1987-1989