Professor Brings Health Law Expertise to Law School Community

Last fall, Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law welcomed Professor Ana Santos Rutschman – a health law and intellectual property expert – to the Villanova Law community.

“It’s been great and very rewarding,” Santos Rutschman explains. “Not only are the students here very, very nice, but most importantly, they really seem to care deeply about the work they are doing.”

Santos Rutschman, an alumna of Duke University School of Law and the Catholic University of Portugal, is equally passionate about her own research and curriculum. She is recognized nationally and internationally as an expert on vaccine law and policy, the regulation of emerging health technologies and access to medicines. Her current areas of focus at Villanova Law include health law, intellectual property, innovation in the life sciences and law and technology.

“I didn’t necessarily think I was going to end up teaching law,” says Santos Rutschman. “It was actually something that was suggested to me, and as I began to explore it and realize how multi-faceted it was, I saw could keep studying, keep devoting time to research, all while teaching. That was very appealing to me.”

Santos Rutschman helped implement Villanova Law’s annual Health Innovation and Equity Speaker Series. Launched in fall 2022, the series brings leading scholars, practitioners and advocates to Villanova Law to discuss longstanding and emerging issues in health law and policy.

According to Santos Rutschman, the series is a way to raise awareness for issues that might go otherwise unnoticed, such as disability laws, progressions within artificial intelligence and the development of certain vaccine technologies. 

“The speaker series is so important because of the diversity of voices that it allows to visit our law school,” Santos Rutschman says. “The subject matter places an emphasis and focus on access to medicines and the equity issues surrounding that – to me, that is something worth bringing attention to.”

Santos Rutschman also helps bring attention to important issues through her legal scholarship. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the UCLA Law Review, Emory Law Journal, Harvard Public Health Review, and Yale Law Journal forum. Her book, Vaccines as Technology: Innovation, Barriers and Public Health, was published last year by Cambridge University Press. She is also frequently quoted in the press, particularly in recent features about COVID-19 vaccines.

Before joining Villanova Law, Santos Rutschman served as the inaugural Jaharis Faculty Fellow at the DePaul University College of Law and as an assistant professor at the Saint Louis University School of Law. During this time, the American Society of Law Medicine and Ethics named her both a Health Law Scholar and Bio Intellectual Property Law Scholar. She has also served as a consultant for the World Health Organization; most recently, she advised on contractual language related to technology transfer and the purchase of vaccines, treatments and diagnostics.

In her role at Villanova Law, Santos Rutschman looks forward to helping current and future students build a path to knowledge and success as principled leaders.

“The most important thing to me is the idea of offering our students the tools to encounter the unforeseeable things that are going to happen to their clients, to the people they are representing,” she explains. “While we want them to understand the different dimensions of law and have the ability to look at issues from different perspectives with strategy in mind, we hope they can always find a way to be compassionate, too.”