Mala is a lawyer, philosopher, 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 is on information. She explores the philosophical questions surrounding legal systems structuring our relationships with and rights in information, broadly construed, including questions around intellectual property, technology, defamation, privacy, speech, and aesthetics. Mala wrote her philosophy PhD thesis on the theoretical foundations of copyright law under the advisement of Liam Murphy, Jeremy Waldron, and Sam Scheffler, and is now working on a book proposal for the monograph. 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 presented it at Berkeley, Stanford, Yale, Columbia, NYU, University of Pennsylvania, and more. Mala also writes non-academic and creative work.
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 is on information. She explores the philosophical questions surrounding legal systems structuring our relationships with and rights in information, broadly construed, including questions around intellectual property, technology, defamation, privacy, speech, and aesthetics. Mala wrote her philosophy PhD thesis on the theoretical foundations of copyright law under the advisement of Liam Murphy, Jeremy Waldron, and Sam Scheffler, and is now working on a book proposal for the monograph. 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 presented it at Berkeley, Stanford, Yale, Columbia, NYU, University of Pennsylvania, and more. Mala also writes non-academic and creative work.
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.