Jet Tigchelaar works at the Institute of Constitutional and Administrative Law and Legal Theory of the Utrecht University. Her research is part of the researchprogramme Family & Law of the Utrecht Centre for European Research into Family Law. She participates in the strategic research programme "Dynamics of Youth".
Her research deals with identity issues. The last years this concerns mainly the registration of (non binary) sex/gender, and before she has written about conflicts of multiculturalism and law with a focus on freedom of religion and gender equality. She has published a.o. about the legal prohibition of the burqa, male and female circumcision, sexsegregation in education and the refusal to shake hands.
She also conducts research in a policy context. In 2020 she developed together with Marjolein van den Brink a decision framework that aims to reduce unnecessary registration and use of information about gender in all kinds of organisations. In a way this is a follow up of an earlier research conducted together with Marjolein van den Brink for the Ministery for Justice to map out the legal and social consequences of not registering gender or leaving this unspecified, considering the problems that some groups of transgender persons encounter.
She considers the didactics of (professional) legal ethics a topical issue. In 2021 she was a guest editor together with Emanuel van Dongen for a Special Issue of the online journal Law & Method on this topic. In 2020-2021 she has organised for honoursstudents of the Utrecht Law College a series of lectures on professional ethics for lawyers. She teaches ethics for law students and coordinates a REBO module ethical skills in an inclusive society.
For "Dynamics of Youth" she has written about equal opportunities for children, children's rights and poverty, and within UCERF she is involved in legal theoretical issues of family law and professional ethics in the context of family law.
She teaches courses (in Dutch and English) like Introduction tot Law, Sociology of Law, Legal Theory, Philosophy of Human Rights, Law & Identity and Law & Ethics and Ethical Skills.
She is member of the UTQ committee.