Mala Chatterjee

Mala Chatterjee is a philosopher, legal scholar, writer, and associate professor at Columbia Law School. She received a Ph.D. in philosophy from NYU in 2022, a J.D. summa cum laude from NYU School of Law as a Furman Academic Scholar in 2018, and a B.A. in Philosophy and Symbolic Systems from Stanford in 2014. Prior to joining Columbia, Chatterjee was a Furman Fellow at NYU School of Law, a fellow at NYU’s Engelberg Center for Innovation Law & Policy, and a visiting fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. 

Chatterjee’s work in law and 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. Chatterjee 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. 

Chatterjee wrote her philosophy Ph.D. thesis on the theoretical foundations of copyright law under the advisement of Liam Murphy, Jeremy Waldron, and Sam Scheffler, 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.