Professor Alicia Hughes

Alicia is a Visiting Lecturer and Research Professor.  Her research interests include intellectual property, social justice, education policy, and comparative law. Her teaching interests include intellectual property, contracts, and business law.  At Boston University School of Law, Alicia teaches Pharma/Biotech Patent Prosecution, a class stressing how patent prosecution affects the value of patents and the effect of decisions made during prosecution on enforceability of patents, while emphasizing patent law principles and doctrines as applied to biotechnology and pharmaceutical patents, specifically. Consistent with one of her interest areas, attention will be paid to recent U.S. Federal Circuit and Supreme Court case law developments and their impact on the field.

A former patent examiner at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Alicia received a B.S. in Biology from Texas Southern University, where she was student body president, a Douglass Honors Institute Scholar, and the MARC-NIH Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher, based on work performed at Baylor College of Medicine. Alicia completed her J.D. at the University of Miami School of Law, where she was an inaugural Miami Scholar and an editorial board member of the University of Miami School of Law International and Comparative Law Review. As a law student, she and her mentor founded a program for minority students geared at diversifying the Florida Bar.  It has since become the statewide model and studied across the country, garnering the ABA Diversity Award. A former congressional staffer for the Honorable Bill Richardson (D-NM), the Honorable John Tierney (D-MA), and the Honorable Juanita Millender-McDonald (D-CA), Alicia later completed public policy fellowships at the University of Virginia in the Sorensen Institute and at the Aspen Institute, where she is a Rodel Fellow and member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network.  She has served as a city councilor and state-appointed commissioner. While on Capitol Hill, she co-founded the Congressional Universal Healthcare Task Force and thereafter created statewide education programs while inaugural director of a biotech institute housed at a research university.

Prior to visiting Boston University School of Law, Alicia completed a federal judicial clerkship in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama and worked in a large law firm.  She also taught intellectual property Widener University’s Delaware Law School and is a business law professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the McCombs School of Business.  Her current scholarship interest includes writing a text on pharma and biotech patent prosecution and articles examining the impact of recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Antherex and Minerva, and an article on the state of voting rights in the U.S. after Shelby County v. Holder and Brnovich. At UPENN, Alicia is focusing her education policy work on economic modeling for novel bridge education programs that streamline the cost of education, sharing efficiencies between secondary public-school systems and universities.  

In her private time, Alicia enjoys philanthropic work in the arts, serving as the vice president of a symphony orchestra, and she is very active with the National Bar Association, where she is Parliamentarian on the Board of Governors and NBA Chief Policy Advisor.