Mala Chatterjee

Mala Chatterjee is a philosopher and legal scholar exploring the theoretical questions surrounding legal systems that structure relationships with and rights in information, broadly construed, including questions of intellectual property, technology, defamation, privacy, speech, and aesthetics. She is also interested in the theories underlying private law doctrine, particularly in torts and property, and how to adapt them to a changing world.

Chatterjee joined the Columbia Law faculty as an associate professor on July 1, 2022. She received her PhD in philosophy from New York University and her JD summa cum laude as a Furman Academic Scholar from NYU School of Law. Chatterjee wrote her philosophy dissertation, The Fruits of Authorship: A Theory of Copyright, under the advisement of Liam Murphy, Jeremy Waldron, and Samuel Scheffler, and she is presently expanding the monograph into a book. Her other scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the peer-reviewed Journal of Legal Analysis at Harvard Law School and Journal of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A., as well as the Columbia Law Review, UC Irvine Law Review, and New York University Law Review.

Prior to joining Columbia Law School, Chatterjee was a Furman Fellow at NYU School of Law. She has also been a fellow at NYU Law’s Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy and at Yale Law School's Information Society Project. While writing her dissertation, Chatterjee clerked for Judge Robert D. Sack on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. She received her BA in Philosophy and Symbolic Systems at Stanford University.