Daniel Lee / Political Theory Workshop

DANIEL LEE, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY

Daniel Lee is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley and specializes in political theory, the history of political thought, and jurisprudence.  His research concerns the reception of Roman law in later medieval and early modern political thought and its influence on modern doctrines of 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 broader interests in political theory include the foundations of democratic theory, the theory of rights, constitutional theory, republicanism, and the philosophy of the social sciences.  Lee’s work in these areas has been published in Political Theory, Journal of the History of Ideas, Review of Politics, and History of Political Thought.  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 Jean Bodin's legal theory and a new critical edition of Bodin's Juris Universi Distributio ['A Division of the Whole Law'], both to be published by Oxford University Press.  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 as a faculty affiliate of the Berkeley Program in Medieval Studies and the Designated Emphasis in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies.

The Political Theory Workshop offers faculty and other scholars an opportunity to present "in progress" or recently completed work to a diverse audience from political science, philosophy, law, and other social sciences and humanities.  Workshop papers come from all areas of political theory, including normative and positive theory, legal theory, and the history of political thought.  Papers are circulated ten days before the seminar. Participants are expected to read the paper before the workshop.  Each session begins with comments and questions on the paper by a discussant, a brief response from the author, followed by a general discussion.