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, and jurisprudence. His research concerns the reception of Roman and canon law in modern political thought (especially Jean Bodin and Hugo Grotius) and their continuing influence on modern doctrines of statehood, sovereignty, rights, and international law. More generally, he has been 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 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.
Daniel Lee is the author of two books. The Right of Sovereignty: Jean Bodin on the Sovereign State and the Law of Nations (Oxford, 2021) examines the origins of sovereignty as the vital organizing principle of modern international law in the legal and political thought of its most influential theorist, Jean Bodin. Professor Lee explores Bodin's creative synthesis of classical sources in history, philosophy, and the medieval legal science of Roman and canon law in crafting the fundamental rules governing state-centric politics. The Right of Sovereignty is the first book in English on Bodin's legal and political theory to be published in nearly a half-century and surveys themes overlooked in modern Bodin scholarship: empire, war, conquest, slavery, citizenship, commerce, territory, refugees, and treaty obligations of states. Professor Lee's first book, Popular Sovereignty in Early Modern Constitutional Thought (Oxford, 2016), traced the juridical origins of modern popular sovereignty doctrines in the legal science of the Roman law tradition. He was a co-editor (with Cornel Zwierlein) of Sovereignty: European and Global Histories, 1400-1800 (Brill, 2025).
He is currently working on three new projects. Sacrosanct is under contract with Harvard University Press. Divisions of Law is forthcoming with Oxford University Press and is a study of early modern legal science in Jean Bodin's Juris Universi Distributio. The Science of Right traces the foundations of legal science and the 'science of morality' from Grotius to Hohfeld.
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. Professor Lee holds degrees from Columbia, Oxford, and Princeton.
Sacrosanct. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, under contract.
Divisions of Law: Legal Science in the Juris Universi Distributio of Jean Bodin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming. 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. 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.