Daniel Lee
Daniel Lee is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and holds a courtesy appointment as an affiliated Professor of Law at the UC Berkeley School of Law. He specializes in political theory, the history of political thought, legal history, and jurisprudence. His research concerns the legal science of Roman law in modern political thought and its continuing influence on modern doctrines of statehood, sovereignty, rights, and international law. He is an internationally renowned authority on the legal and political thought of Jean Bodin and Hugo Grotius. In his current research, he is interested in the relationship between legal science and social science in the history of ideas, as well as the foundations of deontic logic in early modern jurisprudence and social science.
His books include Popular Sovereignty in Early Modern Constitutional Thought (Oxford, 2016), The Right of Sovereignty: Jean Bodin on the Sovereign State and the Law of Nations (Oxford, 2021), and Divisions of Law (Oxford, 2026). He was also a co-editor (with Cornel Zwierlein) of Sovereignty: European and Global Histories, 1400-1800 (Brill, 2025).
He is currently working on two new projects. Sacrosanct is under contract with Harvard University Press. The Science of Right traces the foundations of legal science and natural law in modern jurisprudence from Grotius to Hohfeld.
Sacrosanct. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, under contract.
Divisions of Law: Legal Science in the Juris Universi Distributio of Jean Bodin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2026. Oxford History and Theory of International Law
The Right of Sovereignty: Jean Bodin on the Sovereign State and the Law of Nations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. OUP Blog.
Popular Sovereignty in Early Modern Constitutional Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Forthcoming. Imperfect Rights. Grotiana.
Forthcoming. The Grotian Rights Revolution. Proceedings of the British Academy: Constitutionalism and Political Thought. Ed. Felix Waldmann and Samuel Zeitlin. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2019. Jean Bodin. Great Christian Jurists in French History, ed. Olivier Descamps and Rafael Domingo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cambridge Law and Christianity.
2018. Unmaking Law: Jean Bodin on Law, Equity, and Legal Change. History of Political Thought 39.
2011. Popular Liberty, Princely Government and the Roman Law in Hugo Grotius' De Jure Belli ac Pacis. Journal of the History of Ideas 72. Reprinted in Grotius and Law. Ed. Larry May and Emily McGill. Routledge, 2014.