  We introduce a new class of non-isothermal models describing the evolution of
nematic liquid crystals and prove their consistency with the fundamental laws
of classical Thermodynamics. The resulting system of equations captures all
essential features of physically relevant models, in particular, the effect of
stretching of the director field is taken into account. In addition, the
associated initial-boundary value problem admits global-in-time weak solutions
without any essential restrictions on the size of the initial data.
