We investigate the Ericksen-Leslie system for the Oseen-Frank model with unequal Frank elastic constants in R 3 . To generalize the result of Hineman-Wang [12], we prove existence of solutions to the Ericksen-Leslie system with initial data having small L 3 uloc -norm. In particular, we use a new idea to obtain a local L 3 -estimate through interpolation inequalities and a covering argument, which is different from the one in [12]. Moreover, for uniqueness of solutions, we find a new way to remove the restriction on the Frank elastic constants by using the rotation invariant property of the Oseen-Frank density. We combine this with a method of Li-Titi-Xin [23] to prove uniqueness of the L 3 uloc -solutions of the Ericksen-Leslie system assuming that the initial data has a finite energy.where the free energy density W (u, ∇u) is of the formHere k 1 , k 2 , k 3 , k 4 are the Frank elastic constants, which are usually assumed to satisfy Ericksen's inequalities ([7]The first three terms on the right hand of (1.2) are associated with the splay, twist, bend characteristic deformations respectively, and the fourth term there is