John Cannan - Faculty Scholarship Librarian and Legal Research Instructor

Room 161 | (610) 519-6258 | email

John serves as the Faculty Scholarship Librarian.  He received his law degree from the University of Maryland School of Law and practiced historic preservation and land use law in Baltimore.  After obtaining his MLS from the University of Maryland, College of Library and Information Science, he was assistant law librarian at the Montgomery County (MD) Circuit Court Law Library and a legal information analyst at the Law Library of Congress.  Before coming to Villanova, he was a reference and instructional services librarian at the Drexel University Kline School of Law where he developed and taught courses on intellectual property legal research and health law legal research.  He is a frequent writer on legislative history as well as other legal and legal research topics.  His article A Legislative History of the Affordable Care Act: How Legislative Procedure Shapes Legislative History, 105 L. Libr. J. 131, 163 (2013) was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in King v. Burwell, 135 S. Ct. 2480, 2492, 192 L. Ed. 2d 483 (2015).

Lori Strickler Corso - Head of Staff Development and Legal Research Instructor

Room 159 | (610) 519-7235 | email

Lori currently serves as the Head of Staff Development for the library, providing training to support library projects and identifying professional development opportunities for the librarians and library staff. She also manages our law databases, helps to maintain the law library’s website, creates and manages the library's research guides and develops additional tutorials for faculty and student use. Lori teaches the Advanced Legal Research elective course and guest lectures on research in seminar paper and other courses as well as the law school clinics. Lori joined the Villanova Law Library in 2010, after working as the firm librarian for a large law firm based in Los Angeles. She holds a JD from Northeastern University School of Law and a Masters in Library and Information Science from San Jose State University. She graduated summa cum laude from Shippensburg University with a BA in Psychology and a BS in Criminal Justice, Law Enforcement.

Steve Elkins - Associate Director for Collection Management

Room 164 | (610) 519-7780 | email

Steve coordinates law library activities involving the book collection and online resource procurement, including acquisitions, cataloging and collection management. He also manages the integrated library system and its public catalog interfaces. In addition, Steve supervises the law school archives and prepares law library statistical and budget reports.  Steve joined the library in 1989 after working as a cataloger at the University of Virginia law library.  He has a Masters in Library Science from the University of Maryland, a Masters in English Literature from the University of Virginia and a Masters in Theology from Wheaton College, Illinois.

Amy A. Emerson, Assistant Dean for Library and Information Services & Associate Professor of Law

Room 151 | (610) 519-7023 | email

Amy Emerson is the Director of the Law Library and Associate Professor of Law.  She manages law library operations and strategic planning, oversees the legal research curriculum, and teaches courses in law and technology. Professor Emerson’s full profile is available here.

Mary Jo Heacock - Head of Cataloging and Government Documents

Room 162 | (610) 519-7896 | email

Mary Jo supervises Law Library cataloging and our participation in the Government Document Depository Program. She maintains the Law Library catalog database, processes new materials for the collection and assembles data for the monthly acquisitions list and statistical reports. She researches and fulfills interlibrary loan requests for faculty and students, including those from student journals, and processes interlibrary loan requests from other academic libraries. Mary Jo joined the Villanova Law Library in 2004. She holds a Masters in Library and Information Sciences from Drexel University and a Bachelor’s Degree in Education from Kutztown University.

Jason Happ - Head of Digital Initiatives and Legal Research Instructor

Room 160 | (610) 519-6256 | email

Jason serves as the Head of Digital Initiatives. He was previously the Access Services Librarian at the Howard University School of Law where he taught Legal Research, managed circulation, and assisted with faculty research projects. He has practiced law in Maryland and Washington D.C. He received his Masters of Library Science (MLS) from the University of Maryland at College Park and subsequently worked as a librarian for an AM Law 100 firm in Washington, D.C. He received his J.D. from Tulane Law School and a BA in History and Political Science: International Relations from Tulane University. 

Robert Hegadorn - Foreign, Comparative, and International Law Librarian and Legal Research Instructor

Room 163 | (610) 519-7021 | email

Robert currently supports the scholarly work of faculty as a faculty liaison librarian and as the foreign, comparative, and international law specialist. In addition to his reference and research support, he teaches several sections of Legal Research in the first-year curriculum. He also guest lectures on a variety of research topics including health law, litigation writing, and tax law for the Clinic and the Graduate Tax program.

Before joining the Law Library staff in 2006, Robert practiced law in Missouri, and was later a Reference Librarian at the University of Missouri -Columbia School of Law Library.  Robert earned his B.A. from Columbia College in Columbia, Missouri, his J.D. from the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Law, and his M.A., Information Science and Learning Technology, from the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Information Science and Learning Technology. 

Lorraine Jacobs - Administrative Assistant for the Law Library

Room 150 | (610) 519-7022 | email

Lorraine joined the library in November 1994 as a Cataloging Assistant. She also worked at the Circulation Desk and in Interlibrary Loan before becoming the Administrative Assistant for the library. Currently, in addition to her duties as Administrative Assistant for the library staff, Lorraine continues to work at the circulation desk, manages the library student worker’s hours for the payroll office, assists with editing and updating the website, coordinates the journal/moot court /transfer student writing competitions, and manages student, faculty, and staff Wildcard access on behalf of the law school.

Emma Kearney - Access Services Librarian & Legal Research Instructor

Room 164 | (610) 519-5454 | email

Professor Kearney teaches first-year legal research, supports faculty scholarship and teaching as a liaison librarian, consults with students on research strategies and supervises the student circulation workers at the library. She received her Master of Library Science (MLS) from Indiana University Bloomington and J.D. from the Indiana University Maurer School of Law. For undergraduate studies, she attended Agnes Scott College in Decatur, GA. During law school she gained experience working with public defender's offices in Nashville and Atlanta and with the federal defenders for the Middle District of Pennsylvania. Professor Kearney joined the library in March 2022.

Michael Pratt - Scholarly Services Associate

Room 155 | (610) 519-6301 | email

Michael is a Scholarly Services Associate, responsible for monitoring and maintaining the library’s collections of Villanova Law faculty scholarship, student publications, and digital collections. He curates and publishes these items to SSRN, LawArXiv, SelectedWorks, and our BePress Digital Commons repository, while monitoring faculty profiles and citation counts in HeinOnline and other platforms as they become available. Michael also maintains and updates the library’s ongoing print subscriptions. Michael joined the Law Library staff in 1992. He attended Hofstra University and has a BA in History from Villanova University.

Amy Spare - Associate Director for Library Services

Room 157 | (610) 519-7188 | email

Professor Spare coordinates law library services to faculty, students and visitors for reference, ILL, circulation, reserves, collection development and permissions. She also teaches legal research in the first-year curriculum, serves as a faculty advisor in the Professional Development course and guest lectures in upper-level classes on research strategies in areas such as administrative law, criminal law, sexuality and the law, government documents, and fact finding.  Before coming to Villanova Law in 2005, Amy provided research services in a major law firm in Houston, Texas and headed the Government Publications Department at Rice University, a patent and trademark depository library.   As a practicing attorney, she worked for the Alaska Public Defender’s Offices in Bethel and Anchorage and for Central Pennsylvania Legal Services.  Amy holds a JD from Northeastern University College of Law and an MLIS from the University of Texas at Austin.