In the News

In today's episode, Clara and Courtney speak to Jessica Tueller, Forrester Fellow at Tulane University Law School, about the human rights implications of sex-gender segregation.

Professors Ian J. Murray and Jessica Tueller joined the faculty in July and will teach Legal Research and Writing for first-year law students as Forrester Fellows, a position designed for early-career educators who plan to apply as tenure-track law faculty.

“Following the framing we used in our amicus brief, the Inter-American Court explained that comprehensive sexuality education can teach children and adolescents how to stand up for themselves and to seek help if they experience incest or other forms of sexual violence,” said clinic student and brief co-author Jessica Tueller ’21. “The court’s order is particularly crucial as we’re seeing increasing attacks against comprehensive sexuality education in the Americas.”

Jessica Tueller ’21 answers questions on her year so far as a Robina International Human Rights Fellows at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington, D.C. 

“One of our main goals was to emphasize the interdependence of civil and political rights and economic, social, and cultural rights,” said Jessica Tueller ’21, a clinic student and co-author. “Comprehensive sex ed, universal health care, robust social and economic assistance programs, and other, similar policies are crucial, not only for repairing harm done to individuals, but also for achieving the kind of transformative cultural change that will prevent sexual violence in the future.”

“I think it’s really important that human rights has the capacity to evolve and acknowledge forms of discrimination that weren’t anticipated in an original law or treaty,” said Jessica Tueller, a 2021 Yale Law School graduate who will be working with Piovesan at the Inter-American Commission next year as a Robina Fellow and who collaborated with Piovesan on her paper.

“For example, in the inter-American system, the Court and Commission began interpreting the rights to equality and non-discrimination in the American Convention and the American Declaration to prohibit indirect discrimination a decade before this concept was expressly defined and identified as a human rights violation in the Inter-American Convention against All Forms of Discrimination and Intolerance. And I expect the meaning of these rights will continue to evolve as the Court and Commission deepen their understanding of how indirect discrimination constitutes evidence of and is rooted in structural discrimination.”

Jessica Tueller ’21 will spend her Robina fellowship at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington, D.C. She will be based in the Commission’s Rapporteurship on the Rights of LGBTI Persons, where she will focus primarily on gender stereotyping and transformative equality.