Mala is a philosopher, legal scholar, writer, & associate professor at Columbia Law School. She received her PhD in philosophy at NYU in 2022, her JD summa cum laude at NYU School of Law as a Furman Academic Scholar in 2018, and her BA in Philosophy and Symbolic Systems at Stanford in 2014. Prior to joining Columbia, Mala was a Furman Fellow at NYU School of Law, a fellow at NYU's Engelberg Center for Innovation Law and Policy, and a visiting fellow at Yale Law School's Information Society Project.
Mala's work in law & philosophy explores information, broadly understood. She thinks about the philosophical questions and legal institutions that surround and structure our relationships with and rights to information, as well as its forms and functions in constructing and defining us across space and over time. This includes questions underlying intellectual property, technology, privacy, aesthetics, speech, defamation, and more. Mala is interested in exploring these ideas in her academic writing as well as in public, literary, and creative work, with a particular love for science fiction as a medium for philosophy.
Mala wrote her philosophy PhD thesis on the theoretical foundations of copyright law under the advisement of Liam Murphy, Sam Scheffler, and Jeremy Waldron, a monograph on authorial rights that she is developing further into a theory of authorship. She is also writing a series of academic pieces defending and developing The Extended Self as a normative framework for legal persons, along with its philosophical and legal implications. Her other scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the peer-reviewed Journal of Legal Analysis at Harvard Law School and the Journal of the Copyright Society of the USA, as well as the Columbia Law Review, the UC Irvine Law Review, and the NYU Law Review, and she has been invited to present it at Yale, Harvard, Stanford, NYU, Penn, UCLA, Berkeley, USC, Michigan, Cambridge, and more.
Beyond her academic writing, Mala is working on her first book, a collection of essays entitled The Identity Prism. Weaving together philosophical ideas and thought experiments, cultural and aesthetic commentary, modern puzzles of law and policy, and her personal experience and ideation, it will explore some of the many refracted dimensions of our selves and problematize current preconceptions as to whether and how they might be made coherent, particularly in the information age; and it will further consider what this all might entail for our cultivation of critical reflection, self-compassion, and empathy. She is represented by Allison Devereux at Trellis Literary Management.
Mala’s other loves are music (psychedelic | repetitive | shoegazing | droning); film (David Lynch | Paul Thomas Anderson); dancing (techno | odissi); books (meta | post-modern | absurd); art (surreal | conceptual | post-impressionist); mind-bending science fiction; mind-bending things in general; transcendental meditation; game nights; her butterscotch telecaster; serene deserts; outer space; and life in New York City.
Mala's work in law & philosophy explores information, broadly understood. She thinks about the philosophical questions and legal institutions that surround and structure our relationships with and rights to information, as well as its forms and functions in constructing and defining us across space and over time. This includes questions underlying intellectual property, technology, privacy, aesthetics, speech, defamation, and more. Mala is interested in exploring these ideas in her academic writing as well as in public, literary, and creative work, with a particular love for science fiction as a medium for philosophy.
Mala wrote her philosophy PhD thesis on the theoretical foundations of copyright law under the advisement of Liam Murphy, Sam Scheffler, and Jeremy Waldron, a monograph on authorial rights that she is developing further into a theory of authorship. She is also writing a series of academic pieces defending and developing The Extended Self as a normative framework for legal persons, along with its philosophical and legal implications. Her other scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the peer-reviewed Journal of Legal Analysis at Harvard Law School and the Journal of the Copyright Society of the USA, as well as the Columbia Law Review, the UC Irvine Law Review, and the NYU Law Review, and she has been invited to present it at Yale, Harvard, Stanford, NYU, Penn, UCLA, Berkeley, USC, Michigan, Cambridge, and more.
Beyond her academic writing, Mala is working on her first book, a collection of essays entitled The Identity Prism. Weaving together philosophical ideas and thought experiments, cultural and aesthetic commentary, modern puzzles of law and policy, and her personal experience and ideation, it will explore some of the many refracted dimensions of our selves and problematize current preconceptions as to whether and how they might be made coherent, particularly in the information age; and it will further consider what this all might entail for our cultivation of critical reflection, self-compassion, and empathy. She is represented by Allison Devereux at Trellis Literary Management.
Mala’s other loves are music (psychedelic | repetitive | shoegazing | droning); film (David Lynch | Paul Thomas Anderson); dancing (techno | odissi); books (meta | post-modern | absurd); art (surreal | conceptual | post-impressionist); mind-bending science fiction; mind-bending things in general; transcendental meditation; game nights; her butterscotch telecaster; serene deserts; outer space; and life in New York City.