James Hicks

We are excited to welcome our newest faculty members to WashULaw beginning July 1, 2024.

James’s scholarship focuses on intellectual property and innovation law. His current work draws on methods from statistics and data science to re-examine some of the core tenets of intellectual property theory, and to better understand how and when IP rights incentivize the creation of new technological and creative works. Recent papers explore the role that patents play in directing investment to early-stage software inventions and the relationship between copyright’s duration and the economic incentives that it provides in the music industry. James’s work has been published in the Northwestern University Law Review, the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, the Harvard Business Law Review, and the Indiana Law Journal.

James received a J.D. and a Ph.D. in Jurisprudence and Social Policy from the University of California, Berkeley. He received a B.A. in Political Science from Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He previously served as Academic Fellow at Columbia Law School and the Fellow in Law, Business, and Innovation at Berkeley Law.