Page 6 - HLPI 2022 Brochure

Core JESSICA L. ROBERTS

Director, Health Law & Policy Institute
Professor of Law and Medicine
Leonard H. Childs Professor in Law
Faculty B.A., University of Southern California

J.D., Yale Law School
Jessica L. Roberts is the Director of the Health Law & Policy Institute and the
Leonard H. Childs Professor in Law and a Professor of Medicine specializing
in genetics and the law, health law, and disability law. Prior to joining the
University of Houston, Professor Roberts was an Associate-in-Law at
Columbia Law School and an Adjunct Professor of Disability Studies at the
City University of New York. Immediately after law school, she clerked for the
Honorable Dale Wainwright of the Texas Supreme Court and the Honorable Roger L. Gregory of the Fourth Circuit
Court of Appeals. Professor Roberts’ research operates at the intersection of health law, ethics, and social justice.
Her scholarship has appeared in the Yale Law Journal; Columbia Law Review; Northwestern Law Review; Michigan Law
Review; Notre Dame Law Review; Science; Nature Biotechnology; and the Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics, among
others. Cambridge University Press published her book on “healthism,” co-authored with Elizabeth Weeks Leonard,
in 2018.

Professor Roberts receives, or has received, funding from the Greenwall Foundation and the National Institutes of
Health for her work on the legal implications of genetic technology.

A noted expert on diverse issues of health law, Professor Roberts has been interviewed by several leading media
outlets, including USA Today, U.S. News, The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Houston Chronicle, National
Public Radio, and BBC World Service.

In 2015, Professor Roberts received the university-wide Teaching Excellence Award and the Provost’s Certificate of
Excellence. She was named a 2018 Greenwall Faculty Scholar in Bioethics and is a Health Policy Scholar with Baylor
College of Medicine’s Center for Medical Ethics & Health Policy.

Professor Roberts teaches, or has taught, genetics & the law, disabilities & the law, contracts, and health law.

6