Feature Stories UMass Law: Five new faculty members join UMass Law

Experienced professors, authors, and trial attorneys joined the UMass Law faculty this fall. They include Visiting Professor of Law Joseph Gallardo, Assistant Professor of Law Lisa Owens, Visiting Professor of Law Anna-Marie Tabor, Assistant Professor of Law Anoo Vyas, and Professor of Law Evan Zoldan.

With expertise in intellectual property law, criminal law, unfair and discriminatory practices, and targeted legislation, they will teach classes in contracts, criminal law, civil procedure, and intellectual property law, to name a few.

"We are thrilled to welcome these fantastic teachers and scholars to our UMass Law community. They each bring significant strengths in teaching and scholarship that add to our existing excellence in these areas. Our law students will benefit tremendously from their expertise and experience," said UMass Law Dean Sam Panarella.

"UMass Law has seen tremendous growth in the last several years, with excellent employment outcomes for our graduates, exciting curricular innovations, and growing experiential learning opportunities for our students to live our mission to pursue justice in everything we do," Panarella added. "These new faculty members will be integral to this exciting and important work."

Learn more about the newest members of the UMass Law faculty:

"We are thrilled to welcome these fantastic teachers and scholars to our UMass Law community. They each bring significant strengths in teaching and scholarship that add to our existing excellence in these areas. Our law students will benefit tremendously from their expertise and experience."

Joseph Gallardo, Visiting Professor of Law

Professor Gallardo will teach Criminal Law and Procedure at UMass Law and brings strong writing acumen. His research focuses on the theory and practice of street policing, and he writes for broader public audiences with works appearing in USA Today and The New York Times.

A celebrated educator, Professor Gallardo was nominated for the university-wide Teacher of the Year Award each of the two years he taught at the University of New Mexico School of Law. He has clerked for Chief Judge Kimberly Mueller of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California and Magistrate Judge Maritza Dominguez Braswell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado.

Professor Gallardo received his law degree from Harvard Law School in 2019, his AS from Palo Alto College, and his BS  from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was honored as one of three Most Outstanding Graduates. He spent his final semester in the Office of the Counselor to Chief Justice John G. Roberts at the Supreme Court of the United States.

Lisa Owens, Assistant Professor of Law

Dr. Lisa Lucile Owens is a scholar of law and society with research primarily focused on social inequality, the function of law in society, housing inequality, and research and teaching methodology. She will teach Property Law, Remedies, and Law & Social Change. 

Since Fall 2022, Owens has served as an assistant professor of law at The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth School of Law, where she led the Community Development Clinic. She supervised law students as they served SouthCoast nonprofits, entrepreneurs, and startup businesses that struggled to access legal services due to the costs and helped them navigate transactional legal matters.

Her many outreach activities included leading a workshop to help local New Bedford entrepreneurs with the legal challenges of starting a business, presenting a panel on the Housing Choice Voucher Program, and judging the inaugural mock trial tournament at Harvard Law School. 

She has earned law degrees from Boston College Law School (JD) and Boston University School of Law (LLM). Owens earned her PhD in sociology from Columbia University in 2020, after which she served as a full-time lecturer in the Columbia University Department of Sociology.

Owens' scholarly work has previously been published in journals such as Sociological Methodology, Gender and Society, The Stanford University Law and Policy Review, Critical Sociology, TRAILS, Frontiers in Sociology, and The Alabama Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Law Review.

Anna-Marie Tabor, Visiting Professor of Law

Anna-Marie Tabor will teach Contracts and Lending & Racial Discrimination. Her research interests include employee benefits, consumer financial protection, and civil rights.

As a practicing attorney, Professor Tabor worked to prevent unfair and discriminatory practices in financial services, assuming leadership roles in both the government and nonprofit sectors. She joined the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau soon after its inception and, as a Deputy Fair Lending Director, helped develop a regulatory supervision program to prevent illegal discrimination in lending. She also served from 2018-2023 as the director of the Pension Action Center, a free legal services program at UMass Boston that secures retirement benefits for older people and their families. During her time with the center, the initiative recovered benefits for clients worth $7 million. 

Earlier in her career, Professor Tabor served as an assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the Office of the Massachusetts Attorney General, where she litigated numerous housing discrimination cases. She also worked on one of the first cases brought by a state attorney general to allege racial discrimination against a national subprime lender in connection with conduct leading up to the Great Recession and the foreclosure crisis.

She began her legal career as a litigation associate at Goodwin Procter LLP in Boston. Before attending law school, Professor Tabor worked as a special assistant at the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Legislative Affairs and Public Liaison.

Professor Tabor earned her JD at Harvard Law School and an MS in economics from the London School of Economics. She clerked for the Honorable Bruce W. Kauffman of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

Anoo Vyas, Assistant Professor of Law

Professor Vyas will teach Intellectual Property Law and Business Organizations and will lead UMass Law's Community Development Clinic.

Previously, he was Visiting Assistant Professor of Clinical Law at the University of Akron School of Law. His scholarship focuses on the intersection of technology and the law.

Professor Vyas received his BS degree from Ohio State University, his master's degree in educational policy and management from Harvard University, his LLM in intellectual property from the University of Akron, and his JD from the University of Cincinnati.

Evan Zoldan, Professor of Law

Evan C. Zoldan researches procedural design and legislation. His work on procedural design focuses on exploring the values, devices, and assumptions shared by different procedural systems. His work on legislation focuses on the extent to which Congress and state legislatures may target named individuals for special treatment. His article on targeted legislation, The Equal Protection Component of Legislative Generality, was selected for presentation at the Yale Stanford/Harvard Junior Faculty Forum at Yale Law School to represent the category of Constitutional Law: Theoretical Foundations. His work has been cited by both federal and state appellate courts and in briefs, treatises, and scholarly works.

Professor Zoldan has appeared in the national media, including the Washington Post, CNN, and Bloomberg News. He is a past chair of the Association of American Law Schools Section on Legislation and Law of the Political Process.

Professor Zoldan received his law degree, cum laude, from Georgetown University Law Center, where he served as Notes & Articles Editor of Georgetown's Law & Policy in International Business journal. He received his BA, summa cum laude, from New York University, where he studied political philosophy. After law school, Professor Zoldan served as law clerk to judges on the United States Court of Federal Claims and the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. He also worked as an associate at Kirkland & Ellis LLP and as a trial attorney for the United States Department of Justice.

Before joining the faculty of UMass Law, Zoldan was a professor of law at the University of Toledo College of Law. He will teach Civil Procedure.