Law and Human RIghts: Tzili Mor

Tzili Mor, a Visiting Jurist and Adjunct Faculty in the Health & Human Rights Law Project in the UCLA School of Law, examines the intersecting effects of human rights, gender, and the impact of rule of law reform on lived realities in the Transnational Feminist Reform and National Legal Order project. She draws on her international practice experience to bring applied feminist legal solutions to shape discourse and reform agendas on gender and women’s human rights.  A forthcoming publication tackles Feminist Legal Reform and the Health Impact of Legal Systems Premised on Notions of Women as Communal Gauges of Honor. In that piece she draws on Jordan as a case study to critique the short-sighted and perhaps harmful “technical” feminist law reform efforts of calling for repeal of isolated provisions related to sensational “honor killings.” Her research explores new framing of a feminist rule of law agenda that moves from a technical strategy of isolated amendments to a reform agenda rooted in holistic legal analysis and data on the toll of health and human rights violations and that aims to dismantle patterns of abuse entrenched in law and adverse gender-based stereotypes.  

She highlights positive emerging legal tools in addressing gendered violence in her chapter for The State of the World’s Girls 2014  publication by Plan International. Students in Mor’s seminar on International and Comparative Women’s Human Rights contribute legal research and analysis to organizations promoting women’s economic and social rights, including access to reproductive health services and alleviating the gendered impact of austerity measures, and U.S. obligations to tackle rape in detention. 

An international human rights expert in advocacy, law reform, and litigation focused on gender justice and women’s human rights, Mor was previously acting director and clinical fellow at Georgetown Law’s International Women’s Human Rights Clinic, a global coordinator on human rights defenders with Amnesty International, and a human rights and gender specialist with the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative, based in the Middle East and Central Asia.  She served as a Gender Justice Adviser in Afghanistan working with the country’s first special prosecution Unit on Violence Against Women.  She holds a BA from UCLA, a Master of Science degree focused on International Development from Georgetown University, and JD and LLM degrees in advocacy and international human rights law from Georgetown Law.