Faculty

• Graduation In: B.A.LL.B.(Hons.)
• Graduation From: NLSIU, Bangalore
• Graduation Year: 1998

• Post Graduation In: LLM
• Post Graduation From: University of Warwick
• Post Graduation Year: 1999

• Doctorate In: Film Studies
• Doctorate From: School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU
• Doctorate Year: 2016

• Lawrence Liang graduated from NLSIU, and was a Professor and Founding Dean of the School of Legal and Socio Political Studies at Dr. B. R. Ambedkar University Delhi. He co-founded the Alternative Law Forum, Bengaluru as well as the Center for Internet and Society, and works on the intersection of law, culture, and technology. He has published widely on intellectual property, media law and constitutional law in scholarly books and journals. He has been a visiting scholar and visiting faculty at Yale University, Columbia University, Michigan University, NLSIU, Nalsar, Bilkent University, amongst others. He was awarded the Infosys Prize for Social Sciences in 2017.

Books & Monographs

Objection M’Lord: Cinematic Justice in Popular Hindi Films (Forthcoming, 2026, Oxford Univ. Press)

• 2024: Of Law and Life: Upendra Baxi in Conversation with Arvind Narrain, Lawrence Liang, Sitharamam Kakarala,
  and Sruti Chaganti (Orient BlackSwan)
• 2024: Lawrence Liang and Carl Malamud Controlled Lending by Public Libraries under Indian Law (Public
  Resources, California)
• 2024: The Public Library Movement in India: Bedrock of Democracy and Freedom by Lawrence Liang and Aditya
  Gupta, (Public Resources, California, 2024)
• 2016 Invisible Libraries: Speculative fiction on libraries and the future of reading (Yoda)
• 2007 The Public is Watching: Sex, Laws and Videotape, (New Delhi: PSBT, 2007)
• 2005 Co-Editor, Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts (New Delhi: Sarai/CSDS, 2005)
• 2007 Primer on Open Content, UNDP : IOSN, (Elsevier: 2007)
• 2004 Guide to Open Content Licenses (Piet Zwart Institute: Rotterdam)

• Infosys Prize 2017 under Social Sciences category
• Rice Visiting Faculty Fellow, Yale University
• Hughes Visiting Scholar, Michigan University
• New India Foundation Awardee
• Fulbright Scholar, Columbia University
• British Chevening Scholar, Warwick Law School
• Board Member, iCommons (Creative Commons Intl)

Papers Presented at Seminars / Conferences

2025

• Law as a modality of art and art as a modality of law, Berlin Biennale, September 6, 2025
• Between Infrastructure and Aesthetics, Camp Study Day, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 20th May 2025
• A.I., authorship and the jurisprudence of copyright in India, Centre for policy research
• The Future of Libraries in a digital era, Keynote Address, 150th Anniversary Symposium, Bangalore Club, February 15th 2025
• The Affective Afterlife of Legal Archives: A Literary and Lurid Journey through K. L. Gauba’s Legal Thrillers, Delhi School of Economics, 8th January 2025

2024

• Copyright Law for librarians, Gandhi Bhavan, Bangalore
• Keynote Address on “Representation of Desi Chinese in Indian Cinema”, Beyond Social Cohesion – Global Repertoires of Living Together, Humboldt University, Berlin
• Beyond territory and sovereignty: Unowned objects in Art and Law, Bolzano (September, 2023)

2023

• Archives in Indigenous Film Ecologies in India’ funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK (2023).
• Exceptions and limitations for Librarian under copyright law in India, International conference on “Intellectual property and access to knowledge”, NLUD (13th-May 2023).
• National and international framework for exceptions and limitations for library use in copyright law, National workshop, Gandhi Bhavan, Bangalore.
• Controlled digital lending and copyright, National conference on exceptions, limitations, and copyright law, Cochin University of science and technology.
• AI and Law: New Frontiers, National seminar on challenges of artificial intelligence, IIIT Delhi.
• Digitisation and access to knowledge, Bangalore Literary festival.
• The Legal, the Literary and the Lurid-Affective Afterlife of legal archives, Indian legal history Congress, NLSIU/IP University

2022

• “Jurisprudences of the (Not-Quite) Law”, American anthropological association, Seattle, USA, 11th November 2022
• Keynote Speaker, “Dancing on a double-edged sword: The paradoxes and challenges of free speech in a post-truth world”, National Seminar on Free Speech, PG Department of Law, Guwahati University.
• INA trial in the Red Fort, Nightingales Medical Trust, Bangalore, November 4th 2022
• Speaker, The Reliability of News: Making Sense of the World in a Post-Truth Era, Bangalore International Center
• Literary Challenges to the legal Archive: Poetic versus Legal Justice, in Refresher course on Language and Literature from 15th, October.

2020

• The Pirate Librarian A Fighting Concept or a Friendly One?, Online Talk for Hua Museum, Shanghai, December 2020

2017

• Viral Populism, University of Illinois Urbana Champagne
• Global Significance of the D.U, Critical Race and Intellectual Property Conference, Boston
• Affect and tele viral Politics, Affect Summer School, Shiv Nadar University

2016

• Of bright lights and shadows: Labour, Law and Cinema in India, Jayanta Dasupta Memorial lecture, Kolkatta
• Just Animals: The legal challenge of animals in contemporary cases in India, Center for Contemporary South Asia, Watson Institute, Brown University
• Of Gadflies and sovereign power: Dissent and the quest for Justice, 5th Maharaj Kaul Memorial Lecture, Univ. of California, Berkeley
• Law and the temporal ordering of justice, 10th KC Basu Memorial lecture, NUJS.
• Affective Surplus & Judicia Populism, Madison, Annual Conference on South Asia, University of Winconsin, Madison

2013

• Copyright, Copyleft and Copy Centers: Access to Knowledge and the Science Commons, NCBS, Bangalore, July 2013
• Between Free Speech and Hate Speech, Dangerous Speech Conference, Thailand, March
• Technology and the political ontology of fear, ICES Ethical Futures Conference, Colombo, June 2013
• PUCL lecture series on Free Speech and Democracy, Bangalore, January 2013
• The right to Offend, A conversation with Timothy Garton Ash, New Delhi, January 2013
• Encyclopedias and the making of Indian film history, JNU Conference on 100 years of Indian cinema, New Delhi

2012

• Mirrors, Screes and Windows: Interface cultures and Fear, Lingnan University, October 2012
• The work of culture in the age of Digital reproduction, SAHMAT and IIC Golden Jubilee Conference, New Delhi, September 2013
• Recycling Cultures and Media Urbanism, Informal Economies, Shanghai University, October

2011

• A heap of broken Images: From cinema to the moving image and back, “You don’t belong: festival of Indian cinema”, Beijing
• The work of love in the age of mechanical reproduction, Shanghai University
• Copies without originals: Copy culture and Cinema, Hanzhou School of Art and Architecture
• Law and Justice in the Republic of Love: B.N.Pandey Memorial lecture, University of Toronto
• Piracy and the new Cinephilia, Annenberg School of Communication, Univ. of Pennsylvania

2010

• Delivered the Franz Boas Seminar lecture at Columbia University on Media’s Law: From Representation to Affect
• Law, Visuality and scepticism, Recht As Kultur, Bonn
• Awara’s Constitutional Amendment, Recht As Kultur, Bonn
• Awara’s Constitutional Amendment (Also presented the paper at the history departments at Yale, and Princeton Univ)
• Archive Fever, Meet the media guru, Milan, 2010
• Owning and Owing: Towards a new ethics of Property, Univ of Sao Paulo

2009

• Rewiring the Soul: Technologies of Truth, Lecture as part of “On Certainty” Show, Bose-Pacia Gallery, New York, 10th April 2009
• Love and The Impossible Demands of Justice in Hindi Film, 16 Beaver, New York, 9th April 2009
• Juridical Affect: Cinematic Courtrooms in Indian Cinema, Invited Speaker, Association of South Asian Studies, Stanford University, 7th April 2009
• Archive Fever and Copyright Deliriums, “Digital Economies and the Politics of Circulation”, Columbia University, New York April 3rd – 4th, 2009.
• Towards a new Poetics of Justice; An Examination of the Courts of Women, “Review of 20 Years of the Courts of Women”, Vimochana, Bangalore 29th March 2009
• Their Lordships go tot eh Cinema: The Curios Case of Watching Films Blindfolded, “Circuits of the Popular”, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, March 15th to 17th, 2009
• Law and Fear, Plenary Response to Profs. Jean Comaroff and Prof. Veena Das, Law and Social Sciences Inaugural Conference, January 2009

2008

• Courts of Women, Colombo, Sri Lanka
• Constitutions of Hope in an Era of Global Capital, Transformative Constitutionalisms, New Delhi, May 2008
• The Dominant, The Emergent and the Residual in the Imagination of the Archive, XXXth SARO Lecture delivered at IDRC, New Delhi
• How does an Asian Commons mean? Taipei, January 2008
• Intellectual Property and the Disenchantment of Curiosity, Multimedia Institute, Zagreb, Croatia March 2008
• Intellectual Property and the Disenchantment of Curiosity, Belgrade, Marh 2008

2007

• Humiliation as the Bloodsport of Legal Education, Pedagogic Failures, Amsterdam, October 2007
• Ekalavya’s Secret Archive: Piracy and Democratization of Knowledge in South Asia, I Commons Summit, Dubrovnik, June 2007
• Hospitality and Epistemic Racisms, Summit, Non-aligned initiatives in Education Culture, Berlin, June 2007
• Workshop on Access to Knowledge and Culture organized by Foundation for Media Alternatives & South East Asia Committee on Advocacy (SEACA), Marh 2007
• The Man who mistook his wife for a Book, Academia Sinica, Taipei, October 2007
• WIKIMANIA

2006

• Hostis Humani Generis, The Dictionary of War, Graz, October 2006
• Piracy and the Question of Asia, Asia Commons Conference, Bangkok, June 2006
• Critical legal Studies and Critical Lawyering, Talk at Fordham Law School, NY, April 2006
• Piracy and Access to Knowledge, A2K Conference, Yale Law School, April 2006
• Beyond Representation: The Representational Dilemmas of the Pirate, Annenberg School of Communication, University of Southern California, March 2006

2005

• Introduction to Open Content, Siem Reap, Cambodia, August 2005
• IP and the new Knowledge/ Cultural production, Vienna, June 2005
• Beyond Creative Commons and Open Content, Africa Commons, Johannesburg, February 2005

2004

• Plenary Speaker, “Your Lordships are watching a film: Law, Cinema and censorship”, Vikap, New Delhi, September 2004
• Between hate Speech and performative Speech: Judith Butler and the politics of hate speech regulation, Vikap, New Delhi, September, 2004
• Cinematic Citizenship and the Illegal City, Univ. Of Iowa, Seminar on Images of Justice: law, Cinema and the State in Comparative Perspective, June 2004
• Open Networks and Illegal Networks, Mechanista festival, Glasgow, June 2004
• Mapping the public domain debate on to non US European contexts, Univ. of Warwick, UK, May 2004.
• Open Content Licensing and the future of Cultural production, PZI Institute, Rotterdam, May 2004
• Illegal Media networks and the crisis of media empires, World Social Forum, Mumbai, January 2004

2003

• The Terrorist in Popular cinema, Conference on Media Politics, St. Joseph’s College, Bangalore, November 2003
• Trademarks, Ad jamming and Freedom of speech and expression, Greenpeace workshop on The politics of Food, Bangalore, November 2003
• The social life of the remix, INCD seminar on Cultural diversity, Mumbai, December 2003
• Licenses as cultural Documents, IP and Social Knowledge, Sarai, New Delhi, November 2003
• Porous legalities and avenues of participation, NYU Law school, October 2003
• Porous legalities and avenues of participation, SSRC Conference on IP, the market ad cultural flows, New York , October 2003
• Competing Publics and Emerging Networks: PSBT Seminar, New Delhi, August 2003
• FLOSS and challenges to intellectual property law, Waag Society, Amsterdam June, 2003
• Conflicting publics and copyright law, Bellagio, Italy, March 2003
• Copyright, patents and the dispute over fonts, Indic Computing Workshop, Bangalore, February 2003

2002

• The emergence of intellectual property in daily life and language, The daily life of IP Workshop, Sarai, New Delhi, December 2002
• Mapping the global commons upon the national and local in India, IDPAD Seminar on ICT and development, Bangalore, December 2002, Bangalore.
• Copyright with a capital C and Art with a capital A, at Ananya trust, Bangalore, October 2003
• Mapping the Indian debate on secularism, Conference on Conflict and Cooperation in South Asia, Colombo, Sri Lanka, September 2003
• Intellectual property and the shrinking of the public domain, Sarai Information and politics workshop, New Delhi March 2002.

2001

• Cyberspace and the discourse of regulation: of legal communities, virtual and real, CSCS, November 2001, Bangalore.
• The fair use doctrine in book piracy, Copyright and book piracy seminar, Bangalore, June 2001
• Internet and the transformation of legal practice, Consillience, Bangalore May 2001
• Intellectual property and popular culture, UGC Seminar on Copyright and Economics, Mangalore, February 2001
• Law and justice in Indian popular cinema, Human Rights and Law Conference, Panchgani. December 2001

Articles in Journals and Books

2025

By the flip of a coin, in Vaishna Roy, 50 years of Sholay: Legacy of a pop classic, THG Publishing, 2025.
Objects in the imaginary mirror are closer than they appear, Colah, Z., & Verga, F. (Eds.). (2024). Margherita Moscardini: Metropolitan Voids Agency. Archive Books.
Shadow Libraries in Heman Chong: Meditations on Shadow Libraries. (B. K. Wood, Contributor). STPI – Singapore Tyler Print Institute.

2024

Between Charity and Rights: Law and the Struggle for Worker’s Rights in the Indian Film Industry in Dubin, Adam D., et al., editors. Indian Cinema and Human Rights: An Intersectional Tale. Springer Nature, 2024.

2023

Bulldozing basic structures, Social Change Vol. 53(2), 179-19

2022

“From Unattainable to Distantly Watched Films: Film Archives and their Digital Futures” in Neepa Majumdar & Ranjani Mazumdar Eds., A Companion to Indian Cinema, Wiley Backwell, 2022
The Affective Surplus of Judicial Populism: Law, Media and Mimicry in Ravi Vasudevan, Ed., Media and the Constitution of the Political, Sage, New Delhi, 2022
“From Cinema to the moving image and back” in Rashmi Devi Ed., The Vanishing Point, Moving Images after Video, Tulika, 2022

2021

Piracy, BioScope Volume 12 Issue 1-2, June & December 2021
Shadow Courts for Shadow Libraries: A Legal Trial of a Passion Crime in Madhusree Dutta & Nanna Heidenreich (Eds.), Fake Hybrid Sites Palimpsest: Essays on Leakages, De Druyter, 2021

2020

Book review: Malvika Maheshwari, Art Attacks: Violence and Offense-taking in India. Studies in Indian Politics, Vol. 8 Issue 1, 2020
The Post-Truth Effect on Criminal Justice, Institute of postcolonial Studies, 2020

2016

The Dominant, the Residual and the Emergent in Archival Imagination.” Spheres: Journal for Digital Cultures, vol. 2, Ecologies of Change, 2015, pp. 1-14, doi:10.25969/mediarep/3830.
Paternal and defiant access: copyright and the politics of access to knowledge in the Delhi University photocopy case, Indian Law Review Volume 1, 2017 – Issue 1

2015

Freedom of speech and expression in India, in Pratap Bhanu Mehta et al., Oxford Handbook of Constitutional Law in India, 2015
Dockray, Sean, and Lawrence Liang. “Sharing Instinct: An Annotation of the Social Contract Through Shadow Libraries.” e-flux Journal, 56th Venice Biennale Special Issue, 14 Aug. 2015.
Censorship and the Politics of Micro-Fascism, Censorship and the Politics of Micro-Fascism, Television and Media, Volume 16, Issue 4

2014

Bullies in Armani Suits: Himal Quarterly Journal 2014
Ultranationalism: A proposal for a quiet withdrawal, E-flux, Volume 56, June 2014
Beyond representation: The figure of the pirate. In L. Eckstein & A. Schwarz (Eds.), Postcolonial piracy: Media distribution and cultural production in the global south (pp. 49–78). Bloomsbury Academic.

2013

Following Fans: The Curious case of the man from Japan, Artconnect, IFA Quarterly Journal, September 2013
The Woman who pretended to be who she was (online), Himal Quarterly Journal, 2013
Liang, Lawrence, and Smarika Kumar. “Terrorism, Media Trials and the Right to Fair Trial.” Media and Terrorism, Students Islamic Organization of India, 2013.
Sensuous Encounters: Law, Affect and the Media Event, in Ravi Sundaram (Ed.), No Limits: Media Studies form India, OUP, 2013

2011

Is it a bird? A plane? No, it’s a magic chair, E-flux, Issue 27, 2011
Sensuous Encounters: Law, Affect, and the Media Event,” in No Limits: Media Studies from India, ed. Ravi Sundaram (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013)
Songlines for our times,” in Preview, (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010)

2010

Media’s Law: From Representation to Affect, BioScope 2(1) 23–40
Exceptions and Limitations in Indian Copyright Law for Education: An Assessment, The Law and Development Review, Volume 3, Issue 2 2010 Article 7 SPECIAL ISSUE (2010):
Striving for Magic in the city of Words: Law and the Pursuit of Happiness in the Naz Judgment, in Gautam Bhan, Arvind Narrain et al (Eds.), Law like Love, Yoda, New Delhi, 2010
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Book in Gaëlle Krikorian and Amy Kapczynski (Ed.s), Access to knowledge in the age of intellectual property, Zone Books, NY, 2010
Beyond Representation: The Figure of the Pirate Gaëlle Krikorian and Amy Kapczynski (Ed.s), Access to knowledge in the age of intellectual property, Zone Books, NY, 2010

2009

Piracy, Temporality and the Question of Asia, Indian Journal of Intellectual Property Law Vol. 3 (2009)
Piracy, Temporality and the Question of Asia, Journal of the Moving Image Vol. 7 (2009)
Pandora’s Index of Curiosity and Punishment, in Kajsa Dahlberg, Jane Jin Kaisen, Sreshta Rit Premnath Eds., Shifter Vol. 12.

2008

Mixing Memory and Desire, in Rana Dasgupta Ed., The Rest of Now: The Manifesta Catalogue,
Pirate Aesthetics” (Japanese Translation). In Network Cultures in Asia, edited by Dominic Chen, 2008.
Copyright and Documentary Film in India.” In Copyright and Documentary Film in the Commonwealth, edited by Peter Jaszi, 2008
Voice and Vocabulary, in Manuela Zechner (Ed.), Vocabulaboratories, LISA: Amsterdam (2008)
A Brief history of the Internet in the 15th Century, in Nalini Rajan, The Digitzed Imagination, (New Delhi: Routledge)
Beyond Representation: The Dilemma of the Pirate for Intellectual Property in Peter Jaszi and Martha Woodmansee, (Con)texts of Invention, University of Chicago Press, 2008
And nothing but the Truth so help me science, Sarai Reader 08: Frontiers, New Delhi, 2008

2007

The Man who mistook his wife for a Book: Property and personhood in the Knowledge Era, in Correen Kumar, Ed., Asking, we walk, (Streelekha: Bangalore, 2007)

2006

Shoot, Share and Create, in Rajiv Mehrotra, Ed., Reframing: The World of Indian Documentary Films, (New Delhi: PSBT, 2006)

2005

Copyright and the Politics of Cultural production, Indian Journal of Law and technology, Vol.1, Issue 1, 2005
Porous legalities and avenues of participation, Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts, 2005
Cinematic citizenship and the Illegal city, Inter Asia Cultural Studies, Vol.6, 1 (2005)

2004

Reasonable restrictions and Unreasonable Speech, Sarai Reader 04 : Crisis Media (New Delhi: Sarai/CSDS, 2004)
Copyright, Cultural production and Open Content Licensing, published by Piet Zwart Institute, http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/pubsfolder/liangessay/view
The Ghost in the machine: Legal Capture of Technology, Sarai Reader 03: Shaping technology, (New Delhi: Sarai/CSDS, 2003)

2003

Conceptualizing law and culture: Copyright, Rajnikant and the politics of contemporary signage, Seminar Issue No. 525, Unsettling Cinema, May 2003
Mapping the global commons upon the National and Local: Media Development Vol. 1(2003)
Alternate Lawyering in India, LGD 2001 (2)

2002

Whose convergence is it anyway? A critical introduction to the Convergence Bill, 1 Combat L.J (2002).
Criminal Law seen through bi-foucaults: A postmodern critique of the criminal justice system, 7 Stud. Advocate, 1996.
Tata Yellow Pages v. Union of India: A review, 7 Student Advocate, 1996.
P.Rathinam v. Union of India: The right to die under the constitution, 6 Stud. Advocate, 1995.

Articles in Newspapers and Magazines

• Cops and criminals: Brothers in arms, Frontline, May 4th 2023
• Documentary filmmakers: The unconventional heroes of free speech in India Frontline, July 13th 2023
• Time for a modern law protecting the right to offend through comedy, Frontline, November 16th 2023
• Lead Article: Resident Evil, Frontline, October 7th 2022
• Ultra-nationalists make light of patriotism, Asian Age, Feb 20161
• Plan B for free speech, Indian express, Febuary 16th 2016
• Sedition and the status of subversive speech in India, The Wire 14th febuary 20162
• Vocabulary of justice and being, The Hindu
• What do we talk about when we talk about pornography? The Wire, 4th August 2015
• Free Speech Ver. 2.0 The Hindu March 25th 2015
• Cultural Ignorance and Prejudice, The Hindu, February 4th 20143
• 100 years of film censorship, Frontline , September 2013
• The Erotics of Law, Scandal and Technology, Caravan February 2013
• A guide to infantalising and trivialising the public sphere, January 30th 2013
• A Ludicrous Ban, Open Magazine, June 2nd 2012
• Strangers in a place they call home, The Hindu, August 18th 2012
• Work of art in the age of mechanical injunctions, The Hindu, May 23rd 2012
• Chilling effects and frozen words, The Hindu, April 30th 2012
• Mickey mouse Gandhi and copyright, Prajavani 15th August June 2012
• The pros and cons of the Copyright Act, Prajavani 9th June 2012
• Indian express op ed
• Indian Express Article on Pirate Aesthetics
• Pirate Aesthetics (in Malayalam), Matrbhoomi
• Copyright v. The right to Copy, Indian Express
• Pirate Aesthetics, Magazine of the Streishcer Herbts Festival 2006
• How Rambo lost to the Green Papaya, Tehelka, October 7th 2006
• The Black, White and grey of Copyright, World Information City Newspaper, November 2005
• Bangalored: The Politics of the world information city, Indian Express, November 20th, 2005
• Media Empires and Renegade Pirates, Humanscape, August 2004
• Encountering the sustaining myths of Copyright (Co authored with Atrayee Mazumdar and Mayur Suresh), Infochangeindia.org
• Regulating Cyber- A space or a technology, 1 Voices (2002) 32.
• We are watching you.com: An introduction to privacy issues in cyberspace, 2 Voices (2001) 14.
• Introduction to Copyright, www.infochangeindia.org
• A Case Against the death penalty, Deccan Herald, 6th November, 1994.