mala chatterjee
Mala is a lawyer, philosopher, and legal scholar. She is currently a Furman Fellow at NYU School of Law and a PhD candidate in Philosophy at NYU, as well as 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 received her JD summa cum laude at NYU in 2018, and was a Furman Academic Scholar and Executive Editor of the NYU Law Review. She graduated from Stanford University with a degree in Philosophy and a minor in Symbolic Systems in 2014.
Mala's research interests in law & philosophy concern information. In particular, she explores the philosophical questions--both normative and conceptual in nature--surrounding the legal systems that structure our relationships with and rights in information, broadly construed. This includes intellectual property, technology, defamation, privacy, freedom of speech, and aesthetics. Mala is writing a dissertation on the philosophical foundations of intellectual property under the supervision of Liam Murphy, Jeremy Waldron, and Sam Scheffler. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the peer-reviewed Journal of Legal Analysis at Harvard Law School, the Columbia Law Review, the UC Irvine Law Review, and the NYU Law Review, and she has presented it at Berkeley, Yale, Columbia, NYU, University of Pennsylvania, and more.
In law school, Mala earned the Maurice Goodman Memorial Prize for outstanding academic achievement and scholarship, the John Bruce Moore Award for highest excellence in Law & Philosophy, and the Bradley Fellowship for scholarly work in Free Speech. She was a Pomeroy Scholar and a Butler Scholar (awarded to the top 10 students after 1L and 2L respectively), and elected to the Order of the Coif. Mala worked as a research assistant for professors Jeanne Fromer, Scott Hemphill, Barton Beebe, and Richard Epstein, particularly focusing on trademark and copyright projects. She also conducted independent research with Chris Sprigman and Liam Murphy while in law school. She was a summer associate at the New York office of the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP in 2017, and at the San Francisco litigation boutique Durie Tangri LLP in 2018. She clerked for the honorable Judge Robert D. Sack on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in the 2019-2020 term.
Aside from law & philosophy, Mala loves music (psychedelic or repetitive); film (David Lynch & Paul Thomas Anderson); dancing (techno); art & stories; transcendental meditation; and city life.
Mala's research interests in law & philosophy concern information. In particular, she explores the philosophical questions--both normative and conceptual in nature--surrounding the legal systems that structure our relationships with and rights in information, broadly construed. This includes intellectual property, technology, defamation, privacy, freedom of speech, and aesthetics. Mala is writing a dissertation on the philosophical foundations of intellectual property under the supervision of Liam Murphy, Jeremy Waldron, and Sam Scheffler. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the peer-reviewed Journal of Legal Analysis at Harvard Law School, the Columbia Law Review, the UC Irvine Law Review, and the NYU Law Review, and she has presented it at Berkeley, Yale, Columbia, NYU, University of Pennsylvania, and more.
In law school, Mala earned the Maurice Goodman Memorial Prize for outstanding academic achievement and scholarship, the John Bruce Moore Award for highest excellence in Law & Philosophy, and the Bradley Fellowship for scholarly work in Free Speech. She was a Pomeroy Scholar and a Butler Scholar (awarded to the top 10 students after 1L and 2L respectively), and elected to the Order of the Coif. Mala worked as a research assistant for professors Jeanne Fromer, Scott Hemphill, Barton Beebe, and Richard Epstein, particularly focusing on trademark and copyright projects. She also conducted independent research with Chris Sprigman and Liam Murphy while in law school. She was a summer associate at the New York office of the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP in 2017, and at the San Francisco litigation boutique Durie Tangri LLP in 2018. She clerked for the honorable Judge Robert D. Sack on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in the 2019-2020 term.
Aside from law & philosophy, Mala loves music (psychedelic or repetitive); film (David Lynch & Paul Thomas Anderson); dancing (techno); art & stories; transcendental meditation; and city life.