Philip Lee

B.A., Duke University 1996 (magna cum laude); J.D., Harvard Law School 2000; Ed.M., Harvard Graduate School of Education 2012; Ed.D., Harvard Graduate School of Education 2013.

Philip Lee is a professor of law at UDC David A. Clarke School of Law. He teaches Property I and II, Constitutional Law I, Torts II, Education Law, and Race and the Law. Professor Lee has won the “Outstanding Faculty Award” for teaching. He has served as faculty advisor to the Asian Pacific American Law Students Association, American Constitution Society, National Association Against Police Brutality, Academic Collaboration for Excellence, and Black Law Students Association’s Moot Court Competition Team. He has also been a Visiting Lecturer on Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, teaching on education law topics.

Prior to starting his law teaching career, Professor Lee earned his doctorate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he was a Harvard University Presidential Scholar and a student convocation speaker. While a doctoral student, he was counsel of record for an amicus curiae brief in support of the respondents in Fisher v. University of Texas, a case before the U.S. Supreme Court that posed a challenge to race-conscious admissions in higher education. In addition, Professor Lee taught a course at Harvard titled Race, Law, and Educational Access.

Before starting his doctoral studies, he was the Assistant Director of Admissions at Harvard Law School, where he was a member of the admissions committee and led the office’s diversity outreach initiatives for four years. He also served as an adjunct faculty member at New England Law | Boston, teaching appellate advocacy to second year law students in the fall semesters for two years. Prior to his teaching and administrative work at Harvard and New England Law, he was a trial attorney for five years—working first as an Assistant Corporation Counsel in the Commercial and Real Estate Litigation Division at the New York City Law Department and later as an associate at a white-collar criminal defense boutique in Manhattan.

Professor Lee is a magna cum laude Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Duke University in psychology and sociology, with a minor in religion, and holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, where he interned at Harvard Defenders, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston, and the Criminal Justice Institute. He is admitted to practice law in the state of New York and the commonwealth of Massachusetts, federal courts in New York and Massachusetts, and before the Supreme Court of the United States.

Professor Lee’s research and writing centers on academic freedom, diversity and educational access, school law (K-12), higher education history and law, and property law and race.