James Hicks

James Hicks is a legal scholar, social scientist, and Academic Fellow at Columbia Law School. His scholarship, which is primarily empirical, focuses on intellectual property and innovation law. James’s recent work explores the role that patents play in directing investment to early-stage software inventions. He has also studied the relationship between copyright’s duration and the economic incentives in the music industry. James has a particular interest in the use of machine learning and AI in legal research, and has an ongoing project that uses natural language processing to explore the predictability of patent litigation outcomes.

Beyond intellectual property, recent projects include a study of corporate responses to sexual harassment in the wake of #MeToo and an investigation into the extent of venture capital investments in public benefit corporations (“B-corps”). His work is published or forthcoming 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 Fellow in Law, Business, and Innovation at Berkeley Law.