Rebecca K. Lee

Professor Rebecca K. Lee is an expert in the areas of employment discrimination, employment law, affirmative action, and leadership. She has written on the relationship between diversity and antidiscrimination objectives, the importance of organizational leadership in achieving substantive equality, empathy in judicial decisionmaking, the constitutionality and relevance of affirmative action, sex harassment and the gendered organization, and class assumptions in the judicial interpretations of sex harassment. Her work has been quoted in the amicus briefs for the State of California and other amici filed in the U.S. Supreme Court for Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin (Fisher I), as well as quoted in the amicus brief for the State of California in Fisher II. Professor Lee has served as a past Chair of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Section on Labor Relations and Employment Law. She is a board member of the Conference of Asian Pacific American Law Faculty (CAPALF) as well as a board member of the Western Law Professors of Color (WLPOC).

Professor Lee was a Visiting Professor of Law at UC Irvine School of Law in Fall 2018, where she taught contracts. As a full-time faculty member at Thomas Jefferson, she primarily teaches and has taught contracts, employment discrimination, employment law, and business associations. In addition, she was faculty co-director of the school's Employee Rights Self-Help Workshop from 2013-2018. Before joining the faculty, she was a Visiting Researcher at Georgetown University Law Center and practiced law at the international law firm of Crowell & Moring LLP in Washington, D.C. Her practice centered on employment and labor law, government contracts, and antitrust matters. She also worked at the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs as a Crowell & Moring Public Interest Fellow. In law school, she served as editor-in-chief of the Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law and Policy and worked as a judicial intern for the Honorable Colleen Kollar-Kotelly in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Prior to attending law school, Professor Lee earned a Master's degree in Public Policy from Harvard Kennedy School, where she received the Dean Albert Carnesale Fellowship and was co-managing editor of the Asian American Policy Review. Before pursuing her graduate studies, she joined Teach for America as a corps member and taught at an under-resourced middle school in Oakland, California. She obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree in Public Policy Studies from the University of Chicago. At Chicago, she was awarded a University Prize for her senior thesis, which was selected as the best undergraduate paper written in the area of women's studies, feminist criticism, or gender studies and subsequently published in a law journal.