Lynette J. 
CHUA

 
Vice-Dean (Research)

Professor

Academic Fellow

Dr. Lynette J. Chua is a law and society scholar who studies legal mobilization, legal consciousness, and rights and resistance. She is Professor of Law and Vice Dean (Research) of the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore. In addition, she is an Editor-in-Chief of the Asian Journal of Law & Society, a former President of the Asian Law & Society Association (2022-23), and co-director of the Training Initiative for Asian Law and Society Scholars (supported by a Henry Luce Foundation grant).

FULL BIOGRAPHY

Contact

lynettechua@nus.edu.sg
(65) 6516-5416
TB-08-01C

Education

PhD, MA (University of California, Berkeley); LLB (NUS); BSc (Ohio University)

Curriculum Vitae

View CV

Current Courses

Doctoral Workshop

Dr. Lynette J. Chua is a law and society scholar who studies legal mobilization, legal consciousness, and rights and resistance. She is Professor of Law and Vice Dean (Research) of the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore. In addition, she is an Editor-in-Chief of the Asian Journal of Law & Society, a former President of the Asian Law & Society Association (2022-23), and co-director of the Training Initiative for Asian Law and Society Scholars (supported by a Henry Luce Foundation grant).

Dr. Chua has received multiple awards and recognitions 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. She is the author of The Politics of Rights and Southeast Asia (2022), The Politics of Love in Myanmar: LGBT Mobilization and Human Rights as A Way of Life (2019) and Mobilizing Gay Singapore: Rights and Resistance in an Authoritarian State (2014). Additionally, she is the co-editor of The Asian Law & Society Reader (2023, with David Engel and Sida Liu), Out of Place: Fieldwork and Positionality in Law and Society (2024, with Mark F. Massoud) and Contagion, Technology, and Law at the Limits (2024, with Jack Jin Gary Lee).

Dr. Chua is writing a book, Intimate Legalities (under contract with University of California Press), based on her qualitative study of maintenance of parents laws in Taiwan, China, and Vietnam that require adult children to provide financial support and, in some instances, emotional care, to their elderly parents. She is also conducting a research project called “Governing through Contagion” (with Dr. Jack Jin Gary Lee), which is an ethnography of how colonial and present-day Singapore combat contagious diseases, and how its strategies of control produced and emerged from a web of relationships among humans, creatures, and legal and other technologies.

Books
Lynette J. Chua, David M. Engel and Sida Liu, The Asian Law and Society Reader (Cambridge University Press 2023)

Lynette J Chua, The Politics of Rights and Southeast Asia (Cambridge University Press 2022)

Edited Books
Lynette J. Chua and Jack Jin Gary Lee (eds), Contagion, Technology, and Law at the Limits (Hart Publishing 2024)

Lynette J. Chua and Mark Fathi Massoud (eds), Out of Place: Fieldwork and Positionality in Law and Society (Cambridge University Press 2024)

Book Chapters
Lynette J. Chua, 'Feeling at Home Outside: Embracing Out-of-Placeness in the Study of Law and Resistance' in Lynette J. Chua and Mark Fathi Massoud (eds), Out of Place Fieldwork and Positionality in Law and Society (Cambridge University Press 2024) 103

Lynette J. Chua, 'Reinventing a Public Assembly: Pink Dot, Singapore' in Tabatha Abu El-Haj, Michael Hamilton, Thomas Probert and Sharath Srinivasan (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Peaceful Assembly (Oxford University Press 2024)

Lynette J Chua, 'Rights Mobilization: A View from Southeast Asia' in Steven A. Boutcher, Corey S. Shdaimah and Michael W. Yarbrough (eds), Research Handbook on Law, Movements and Social Change (Edward Elgar 2023) 20

Lynette J. Chua, 'LGBTQ Rights: Singapore' in David S. Law (ed), Constitutionalism in Context (Cambridge University Press 2022) 281

Lynette J. Chua and David M. Engel, 'Legal Consciousness' in Mariana Valverde, Kamari M. Clarke, Eve Darian Smith, Prabha Kotiswaran (ed), The Routledge Handbook of Law and Society (Routledge 2021)

Lynette J Chua and Jack Jin Gary Lee, 'Governing through Contagion' in Victor V. Ramraj (ed), Covid-19 in Asia: Law and Policy Contexts (Oxford University Press 2021) 116

Lynette J Chua, 'Human Rights Activism, Sexuality, and Gender' in Marie-Claire Foblets, Mark Goodale, Maria Sapignoli, and Olaf Zenker (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Law and Anthropology (Oxford University Press 2021)

Journal Articles
Lynette J. Chua, '“He Is Still Your Father”: Tetherings, Social Welfare, and Troubled Parental Maintenance Litigation in Taiwan' [2024] Law & Social Inquiry

Lynette J. Chua and Jack Jin Gary Lee, 'Smallpox vaccination and the limits of governing through contagion in the Straits Settlements, 1868–1926' (2023) 45 (3) Law and Policy 331

Lynette J. Chua, 'Constitutional interpretation and legal consciousness: Out of the courts and onto the ground' [2023] International Journal of Constitutional Law

Lynette J Chua, 'Interregna: Time, Law, and Resistance' (2021) 46 (1) Law & Social Inquiry 268

Representative Publications

Lynette J. Chua, Mobilizing Gay Singapore: Rights and Resistance in an Authoritarian State (Temple University Press 2014)

 

Please visit https://lynettechua.academia.edu/ for the complete publication list.


  • Law and society
  • Socio-legal studies
  • Legal mobilization
  • Legal consciousness
  • Law and emotions
  • Qualitative, empirical scholarship