The anisotropic photoreaction of a liquid-crystalline (LC) copolymer comprising one co-monomer being anisotropically photo-crosslinkable by linearly polarized (LP)-UV light and the other being insensitive to UV-irradiation is presented. Polarized UV and IR studies suggested a photo-induced alignment of the mesogenic side groups during the LP-UV photoreaction at the LC temperature range of the copolymer. The direction of the aligned mesogenic groups is parallel to the electric vector of the incident LP-UV light and the induced birefringence is 0.07.