Deleso A. Alford, the Rachel Emanuel Endowed Professor at Southern Univ. Law Center is doing ground-breaking work bridging legal and medical education by telling stories—what she refers to as “HER stories” the unique and particularized lived experiences of black women intersecting with health care and research. Her scholarship has moved from classrooms to court room, benefiting legal, healthcare professions and society with her racially inflected lessons.
She earned a B.S., magna cum laude at Southern Univ. A&M College, a J.D. at Southern Univ. Law Center, and an LL.M. at Georgetown Univ. Law Center. Her interest in bioethics led to her earning a Certification in Clinical Bioethics from the Medical College of Wisconsin.
Her seminal law review article written over a decade ago, entitled ‘HeLa Cells and Unjust Enrichment in the Human Body’, serves as a catalyst and theory of the case for the current historical Henrietta Lacks litigation. The first complaint against biotechnology company, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc. resulted in a historic confidential settlement for the Lacks’s family (August 1, 2023). She recently submitted an Amicus Brief in the second unjust enrichment lawsuit filed against Ultragenyx Pharmaceutical company for its wrongful profits from use of Henrietta Lacks’s immortal cell line (August 10, 2023). A federal judge in Maryland rejected the pharmaceutical company’s attempt to dismiss the lawsuit in a 76-page memorandum opinion on May 20, 2024.
Representative courses taught by Professor Alford include Torts I and II, Federal Jurisdiction, Civil Procedure, Law and Racism, Bioethics and the Law, Race and the Law. Recently, she facilitated virtual chat cultural competency teaching modules for an audience consisting of LSU Health Sciences Center Shreveport School of Medicine, School of Graduate Studies, and School of Allied Health Professions.
Professor Alford is a former Adjunct Faculty, Associate Professor of Medicine (Medical Education) at Univ. of Central Florida (UCF) College of Medicine and the Co-Director of the Longitudinal Curricular Themes (LCT) in Culture, Health, and Society. She is a nationally sought after interdisciplinary speaker who has been referred to as “a prolific and impactful “HERstory” teller changing the legal landscape of bodily autonomy and medical ethics.”