Kher Shing Lynette Janice Chua

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 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 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.