Lynette J. 

CHUA

Dr. Lynette J. Chua is a law and society scholar who specializes in 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 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). She has also published in a wide range of journals and edited collections spanning law and society, constitutional law, political science, sociology, anthropology, and social policy.

Across her work, Dr. Chua explores questions about legal power, particularly whether and how differently situated social groups engage the law, how they experience legal power, and whether and how identities, social relationships, and legal institutions may or may not alter as a result of those interactions. At present, she is writing a book, Intimate Legalities (under contract with University of California Press), based on her qualitative, comparative 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), 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.

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