Professor Lynette Chua appointed inaugural Chair of Jernal Singh Khosa Professorship in Law

We congratulate Professor Lynette Chua ’03—Vice Dean of Research at the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law, and Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Asia Research Institute at NUS—on being appointed to the recently established Jernal Singh Khosa Professorship in Law. This appointment recognises her pioneering research in the field of socio-legal studies, focusing on how specific social groups engage with legal power and the effects of those interactions on identities, relationships and legal institutions.

The professorship was established by Mrs Sarjit Singh Khosa in late 2022 in memory of her husband, Mr Jernal Singh Khosa (1932-1988). “I feel deeply honoured to be appointed to the Jernal Singh Khosa Professorship, which celebrates Mr Khosa’s passion for the law and his strong sense of justice. I hope that my research continues to advance Mr Khosa’s noble aspirations for the law, which earned him the respect of fellow lawyers and other members of the legal profession,” said Professor Chua.

A renowned socio-legal scholar specialising in legal mobilisation and legal consciousness, Professor Chua has received multiple major awards for her research and writing, including the 2024 International Prize of the Law & Society Association in recognition of her significant contributions to the advancement of knowledge in the field of law and society. In 2025, her article on parental maintenance litigation in Taiwan was awarded the distinguished Socio-Legal Article Prize by the Socio-Legal Studies Association of the UK, one of the world’s leading associations in the field of socio-legal research.

At present, Professor Chua is writing a book, Intimate Legalities, based on a 10-year, comparative legal ethnography on maintenance of parents laws in Taiwan, China and Vietnam. The book will examine the conditions under which parents sue their children for financial maintenance and, in some cases, emotional care, and the effects of parental maintenance laws combined with elderly welfare policies on children, parents, as well as the state.

Professor Chua’s most recently published books include Out of Place: Fieldwork and Positionality in Law and Society (2024, with Mark Massoud), The Asian Law & Society Reader (2023, with David Engel and Sida Liu), The Politics of Rights and Southeast Asia (2022), and The Politics of Love in Myanmar: LGBT Mobilization and Human Rights as A Way of Life (2019). She has also published in a wide range of journals and edited collections spanning socio-legal studies, constitutional law, political science, sociology, anthropology and social policy.

Currently, Professor Chua is also conducting a major research project called “Governing through Contagion” (in collaboration with Dr Jack Jin Gary Lee). With the support of a team of research assistants, they are collecting and analysing data to write an ethnography of how colonial and contemporary Singaporean governments combat contagious diseases; how their strategies of control produced and emerged from a web of relationships among humans, creatures, and legal and other technologies; and how the interactions among humans, non-human creatures and technologies produced disparate effects on differently situated populations.

In addition, Professor Chua has mentored dozens of early career scholars, most notably through the Training Initiative for Asian Law and Society Scholars that she co-organised between 2019 and 2023. She was the first woman to be elected president of the Asian Law & Society Association (2022-23). She is also the Coordinator of Global Activities for the Law & Society Association and an Editor-in-Chief of the Asian Law & Society Journal.