Justin Hughes teaches intellectual property and international trade courses at Loyola Law School, Loyola Marymount University, where he is the Hon. William Matthew Byrne, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Law; he is also a Visiting Professor of Law at Oxford University.
Prior to joining the Loyola faculty, Professor Hughes taught at Cardozo Law School in New York, where he was founder of Cardozo’s Indie Film Clinic, the first of its kind. He has also been a visiting professor at UCLA and the Hosier Distinguished Visiting Professor at DePaul.
From 2009 through 2013, Professor Hughes also worked in the Obama Administration as Senior Advisor to the Undersecretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property. In that capacity he was the United States chief negotiator for the Beijing Treaty on Audiovisual Performances (2012) and the Marrakesh Treaty for the Blind (2013). He has been named among the 100 most influential people in intellectual property by Managing Intellectual Property and, in 2019, was awarded the National Federation for the Blind’s Global Literacy Award.
In the 1990s, Professor Hughes did volunteer work in democracy development in Latin America, west Africa, and the Balkans. From 2005 to 2009, he served as chairman of the Technicolor/Thomson Foundation for Film and Television Heritage, headquartered in Paris.
Professor Hughes is the author of many scholarly articles as well as popular essays on topics ranging from politics to architecture. Prior to joining academia, he practiced international arbitration in Paris and litigation in Los Angeles. As a Henry Luce Scholar, he clerked for the Lord President of the Malaysian Supreme Court in Kuala Lumpur. He was educated at Oberlin and Harvard.