Rate My Professor Sophia Z. Lee

Sophia Z. Lee is the Dean and Bernard G. Segal Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, with a secondary appointment in history. She earned a Ph.D. in history from Yale University in 2010, receiving distinction in her dissertation and qualifying examinations, along with the Stephen Vella Prize. Her J.D. is from Yale Law School in 2006, where she served as Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities and won the Benjamin Scharps Prize and Joseph Parker Prize. She also holds an M.S.W. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1999 and a B.A. with highest honors in 1994. Lee joined Penn Carey Law in 2009 as Assistant Professor of Law, advancing to Professor of Law and History in 2014. She served as Deputy Dean from 2015 to 2017, and previously was a Samuel I. Golieb Fellow at New York University School of Law and clerked for Honorable Kimba M. Wood of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Lee's scholarship centers on administrative and constitutional law viewed historically, pioneering administrative constitutionalism to examine agencies' roles in constitutional development, privacy's constitutional origins, administrative law and racial justice, and civil rights-labor rights intersections. Key publications include her book The Workplace Constitution from the New Deal to the New Right (Cambridge University Press, 2014), which earned an Honorable Mention for the J. Willard Hurst Prize; Our Administered Constitution: Administrative Constitutionalism from the Founding to the Present, 168 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1699 (2019); The Reconciliation Roots of Fourth Amendment Privacy, University of Chicago Law Review (2024); Racial Justice and Administrative Procedure, 97 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 161 (2022); and A Revolution at War with Itself? Preserving Employment Preferences from Weber to Ricci, 124 Yale L.J. 100 (2014). She has received Penn Carey Law's Harvey Levin Award for Teaching Excellence (2023), Robert A. Gorman Award (2022), and A. Leo Levin Award (2019). Her work illuminates law's political dimensions and non-judicial influences, with leadership in the American Society for Legal History and Labor and Working Class History Association.