Meet the Dean

Sophia Z. Lee is the Dean and Bernard G. Segal Professor of Law at Penn Carey Law, with a secondary appointment in history. A prominent legal historian, award-winning teacher, and respected leader, Dean Lee is committed to Penn Carey Law providing an outstanding legal education that is broadly accessible, innovative, and interdisciplinary.

Lee’s scholarship focuses on administrative and constitutional law, using history to place the law in broader context and examine how the law’s past can shed light on its future. She helped pioneer the study of “administrative constitutionalism,” and her work on civil rights lawyering generated interest in the relationship between administrative law and racial justice movements. Her forthcoming work examines the origins of privacy as a constitutional value and their implications for contemporary Fourth Amendment doctrine.

Dean Lee has received Penn Carey Law’s Harvey Levin, A. Leo Levin, and Robert A. Gorman awards for excellence in teaching. Her classes include Administrative Law, Employment Law, and seminars on racial justice movements and on constitutional history and theory.

Dean Lee joined the Penn Carey Law faculty in 2009 as an Assistant Professor of Law and served as Deputy Dean from 2015 to 2017. She has held leadership roles in the American Society for Legal History and the Labor and Working Class History Association. Prior to joining the Law School, she was a Samuel I. Golieb Fellow at New York University School of Law and clerked for the Honorable Kimba M. Wood of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

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