Lawrence Liang

Lawrence Liang is a professor of law at Ambedkar University Delhi.[1] He is known for his legal campaigns on issues of public concern. He is a co-founder of the Alternative Law Forum and by 2006 had emerged as a spokesperson against the politics of "intellectual property". In 2017, he received the Infosys Prize for Social Sciences in recognition of his creative scholarship on law and society.[2] Lawrence Liang was found guilty of sexual harassment by the Committee for the Prevention of Sexual Harassment at Ambedkar University, Delhi.[3] The committee released a report with these findings of Liang's guilt, on February 20, 2018, about four months after his name was prominent in a List of Sexual Harassers in Academia, called #LoSHA. This crowdsourced list was posted by 24 year old, queer, Dalit, non-binary, law student, Raya Sarkar, on their Facebook profile, and had the names of alleged sexual harassers in Indian universities. Raya Sarkar got many threats to their life for compiling this list, but stood firm nevertheless.[4] In a signature move, Indian Savarna elite feminists "appealed" for the #LoSHA to be withdrawn, arguing for the power of "due process, which is fair and just," or at least to be restricted to the level of due process. They thus rhetorically erased the immense power differentials that exist in Indian social topography, across the divides of caste and class, religion and region, colonizer and colonized, for allegedly "due" processes that are anything but "fair and just" for a vast majority of women and non-binary individuals, in institutions that are structurally and endemically biased.[5] Liang was then, as now, a member of the Kafila Collective, which published this much-critiqued statement co-written by Ayesha Kidwai, Brinda Bose, Janaki Abraham, Janaki Nair, Kavita Krishnan, Madhu Mehra, Nandini Rao, Nivedita Menon, Pratiksha Baxi, Ranjani Mazumdar, Sabeena Gadihoke, Shikha Jhingan, Shohini Ghosh, Vrinda Grover, and posted by Nivedita Menon.[6] (This statement seems to be in the grey zone because although the site is up, yet Wikipedia will refuse the edits with the actual link on Kafila to "STATEMENT BY FEMINISTS ON FACEBOOK CAMPAIGN TO 'NAME AND SHAME.'")

Lawrence Liang
Lawrence Liang in June 2007; photo by Joi Ito

Liang's key areas of interest are law, popular culture and content piracy. He has been working closely with Sarai, New Delhi on a joint research project Intellectual Property and the Knowledge/Culture Commons. Liang is a "keen follower of the open source movement in software", Lawrence Liang has been working on ways of translating the open source ideas into the cultural domain.[7] Segments of an interview with Liang commenting extensively on copyright and culture are featured in Steal This Film (Two).

Liang is author of Sex, laws and Videotape: The Public is watching and Guide to open content licenses, published by the Piet Zwart Institute in 2004.[8]

Work

He has critiqued and influenced the debate on changes in the Indian Copyright Act. " We were trying to oppose that, showing how such a law would be harmful for creative innovation. Right now we are also supporting a campaign in pharmaceutical policies. But our focus is not so much on policy advocacy, because you cannot really defend the grey economy and be on policy bodies. With regard to government, we try to push for the open-source model, arguing that public money should go into public intellectual property," Liang said in the December 2004 interview to World-Information.org.[9]

In 2004 he was a research fellow at Media Design Research, Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam."[10]

Advisor/mentor

Liang was also group advisor/mentor of the 2006–07 International Policy Fellowship of the Open Society Institute.[11]

JNU Protests

During the famous 2016 protests at Jawaharlal Nehru University where he was a PhD student at the time, Liang gave a public speech as part of an 'Alternative Classroom' on laws relating to sedition.[12]

Background

Liang is a graduate from the National Law School of India University, and pursued a master's degree in Warwick, England on a Chevening Scholarship.[7] He obtained his PhD in Cinema Studies from the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2017.[13][14] He was a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan School of Information and the Center for South Asian Studies as part of the Hughes Fellowship in 2014 and Rice Visiting Scholar at Yale University in 2016-17. He is currently Professor of Law at School of Law, Governance and Citizenship, Ambedkar University Delhi, India.

See also

References
  1. "AUD Website - People - Faculty". www.aud.ac.in. Retrieved 31 March 2018.
  2. "Infosys Prize - Laureates 2017 - Prof. Lawrence Liang". www.infosys-science-foundation.com. Retrieved 1 December 2017.
  3. Chowdhury, Aarefa Johari & Shreya Roy. "Why Ambedkar University held law professor Lawrence Liang guilty of sexual harassment". Scroll.in. Retrieved 29 March 2023.
  4. "Raya Sarkar faces death, rape threats after sexual predators' list takes academia by storm-India News , Firstpost". Firstpost. 28 October 2017. Retrieved 29 March 2023.
  5. "Courageous Raya Sarkar and #MeToo and #NameThemShameThem Campaigns - Velivada - Educate, Agitate, Organize". Velivada. 26 October 2017. Retrieved 29 March 2023.
  6. "About". KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006. 19 October 2006. Retrieved 29 March 2023.
  7. "Our Team". Alternative Law Forum. Retrieved 14 December 2012.
  8. "Willem de Kooning Academie | pzwart.nl". Pzwart.wdka.hro.nl. Archived from the original on 28 January 2010. Retrieved 18 February 2014.
  9. https://web.archive.org/web/20061014204433/http://world-information.org/wio/readme/992003309/1102877551. Archived from the original on 14 October 2006. Retrieved 30 August 2006. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  10. "Welcome to the Piet Zwart Institute". Piet Zwart Institute. Archived from the original on 9 June 2009. Retrieved 18 February 2014.
  11. Mikre, Henok. "Dick Kawooya – Advisor". Policy.hu. Retrieved 18 February 2014.
  12. Lawrence Liang's Speech at JNU Alternative Classroom delivered on 28.02.2016., archived from the original on 19 December 2021, retrieved 5 December 2019
  13. "JNU, Annual Report, page 29" (PDF).{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  14. "Lawrence Liang AUD Faculty Bio".{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
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