Jessica Roberts

Jessica L. Roberts is the Professor of Law in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Data Science at Emory University School of Law. She received her J.D. from Yale Law School in 2006, where she served as Articles Editor and Book Review Editor for the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism, and her B.A. summa cum laude in Political Science from the University of Southern California in 2002, earning departmental honors, the Renaissance Scholar Prize, and induction into Phi Beta Kappa as a junior. Before joining Emory in 2024, Roberts held the position of Full Professor and Leonard H. Childs Chair in Law from 2019 to 2024 at the University of Houston Law Center, where she also directed the Health Law & Policy Institute from 2015 to 2024. She advanced from Assistant Professor (2010-2015) to Associate Professor (2015-2018) at UH Law and maintained a courtesy appointment as Professor in the Department of Health Systems and Population Health Sciences at the University of Houston College of Medicine from 2019 to 2024. Early in her career, she clerked for Judge Roger L. Gregory on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (2007-2008) and Justice Dale Wainwright on the Texas Supreme Court (2006-2007), and taught as an Associate-in-Law at Columbia Law School and adjunct at CUNY.

Roberts specializes in the legal and ethical issues related to genetics and other emerging health technologies, disability rights, and antidiscrimination law, including AI in healthcare. Her scholarship appears in leading journals such as the Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, and Science. Prominent publications include the book Healthism, co-authored with Elizabeth Weeks Leonard (Cambridge University Press, 2018); "GINA, Big Data, and the Future of Employee Privacy" with Bradley A. Areheart (128 Yale L.J. 710, 2019); "Genetic Race? DNA Ancestry Tests, Racial Identity, & the Law" with Trina Jones (120 Colum. L. Rev. 1929, 2020); "Genetic Duties" with Alexandra L. Foulkes (62 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 143, 2020); and "Innovating Accessible Health Care" (110 Iowa L. Rev. 225, 2024). Funded by the National Institutes of Health and Greenwall Foundation, her work has earned the Greenwall Faculty Scholar in Bioethics (2015-2018), University of Houston University-Wide Teaching Excellence Award (2015), Provost’s Certificate of Excellence (2015), and Judge Hilton Monroe Fuller, Jr. Faculty Award (2024-2025). She teaches Health Technology, Genetics & the Law, and Disabilities & the Law at Emory, and has contributed to media discussions in The New York Times, NPR, and BBC World Service.

Professional Email: jessica.lynn.roberts@emory.edu