mr. T.J. (Tessa) Jager

Tessa Jager joined the Groningen Centre for Health Law in October 2024 as a doctoral researcher. Her PhD project 'Alcoholregulering: navigeren tussen toestaan en verbieden' is funded through the ZonMw call on alcohol prevention projects. The project investigates how law can be utilised to decrease alcohol-related harm in the Netherlands and beyond. It examines the optimal balance between regulating and prohibiting the use, sale and distribution of alcoholic beverages at national and international legal levels, seeking a 'sweet spot' where health-harm and social costs are minimised.

The project aims to bridge health evidence on alcohol consumption and its policy implications with the feasibility of embedding these findings into legal frameworks. It is organized around three work-packages: 1) a doctrinal legal analaysis of national, European and international regulatory frameworks for alcohol; 2) a comparative legal study of regulatory regimes for alcohol, tobacco and cannabis in the Netherlands and regulatory regimes for alcohol in the Netherlands and Australia, and 3) operationalizing the findings through focus-groups with national policymakers, stakeholders and experts to investigate the feasibility of implementing legal instruments or policy measures to reduce alcohol-related harm. Tessa is supervised by. Prof. Dr. Brigit Toebes and Prof. Dr. Michelle Bruijn from the University of Groningen, Dr. Desiree Spronk from Trimbos Institute in Utrecht and Dr. Koen Smit from the La Trobe University in Melbourne.

Tessa holds an LLM in International Law from the Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies. She obtained her LLB from Utrecht University (Utrecht Law College) in 2017 including an exchange at the University of Edinburgh in 2019-2020. She obtained the SVH basic chef diploma in 2024.

Before starting her PhD, Tessa gained professional experience in health law research through positions with the NGO Alliance for Health Promotion in Geneva (2023) and the Pharmaceutical Accountability Foundation (2020-2021). She also gained experience in multilateral fora at the European Parliament Research Service (2021) and in the human rights team of the Netherlands Permanent Mission to the UN and other international organisations in Geneva (2022).

Her research interests lie within the research fields of global health law, human rights, the regulation of lifestyle risk factors, with a focus on the intersection of national, European and international law.