Daniel Lee

Daniel Lee is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of Graduate Studies in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.  He specializes in political theory, the history of political thought, and jurisprudence.  His research concerns the reception of Roman and canon law in later medieval and early modern political thought and their influence on modern doctrines of statehood, sovereignty, and rights, especially in the legal and political thought of Jean Bodin, Hugo Grotius, and Thomas Hobbes.  More generally, he has been interested in the relationship between legal science and social science in the history of ideas.  His wider interests in political theory also include the foundations of democratic theory, the theory of rights, constitutional theory, republicanism, and the philosophy of the social sciences.  He is the author of Popular Sovereignty in Early Modern Constitutional Thought (Oxford, 2016), which locates the juridical origins of modern popular sovereignty doctrines in the legal science of the Roman law tradition.  He is currently preparing a monographic study of Bodin's legal theory, The Right of Sovereignty, and a new critical edition of Bodin's outline of general jurisprudence, the Juris Universi Distributio ['A Division of the Whole Law'], both to be published in the Oxford History and Theory of International Law series.  Professor Lee is the winner of the APSA Leo Strauss Award, the Forkosch Prize, and a Mellon Fellowship in the Columbia Society of Fellows.  Prior to his arrival at Berkeley, he taught political theory at the University of Toronto and Columbia University.  He serves on the advisory boards of the Berkeley Program in Medieval Studies, the Kadish Center for Morality, Law, and Public Affairs, and as faculty affiliate of the Designated Emphasis in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at Berkeley.  Professor Lee holds degrees from Columbia, Oxford, and Princeton.  

Professor Lee's Courses