Toward Tomorrow

Drawing on her own lived experiences, Lee advises students to expect the unexpected. More than ever, she said, careers are malleable—where you start may be poles apart from where you end up. Her message is well-calibrated for this era of rapid change, both in society and in the legal profession.

“The career paths for our graduates are going to look really different than they did 20 or 30 years ago,” said Lee, Dean and Bernard G. Segal Professor of Law. “The legal profession is changing, so it is much less common to have a lockstep career ladder. I have tried to emphasize to my students that there are a lot of side paths off the main road.”

Indeed, Lee’s path to becoming the first woman dean at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School has been unconventional. She is a legal historian, a former social worker, and a long time Penn Carey Law faculty member.

After graduating from the University of California at Berkeley with a bachelor’s degree and master’s in social welfare, she spent most of her twenties counseling young parents starting families. The work fulfilled her, but Lee discovered that legal services lawyers were doing essentially the same things as social workers, with better access to strategic partners. During her thirties, Lee earned her JD and PhD in history from Yale, which in turn fostered her academic career so that, in her words, she could pursue scholarship while remaining “connected to people who are engaged with real-world problems and are trying to develop real-world solutions.”

Informed by her respect for the past and her own latticed career trajectory, Lee remains mindful of the storied history of the institution she is called upon to lead even as she is attentive to its rapidly changing future. She recognizes the importance of both preserving the traditions of the 173-year-old Law School and ensuring that it charts new paths forward.

Excellence, Community, and Service

ee’s journey to Penn Carey Law was not typical, yet her move felt serendipitous due to the close alignment of the school’s strengths with her unique background. Now, her multifaceted expertise enriches her leadership role with a distinctive outlook

Lee noted, “As a social worker and historian, I value understanding how advocates and policymakers have successfully shaped the law in new directions in the past and can provide helpful models for navigating changes in legal practice today. My training has also underscored the value of being receptive to diverse perspectives, integrating knowledge from various fields, and approaching complex legal challenges with a comprehensive understanding of the world around us.”

And she brings these values into practice. Lee firmly believes that legal education at Penn Carey Law should be broadly accessible, innovative, and interdisciplinary. She makes finding new ways to foster academic excellence a cornerstone of her vision for the Law School. Lee also extols the value of a cross-disciplinary education, which is a hallmark of the Penn Carey Law curriculum and is embedded in the school’s philosophy. Interdisciplinary study enables students to explore the law from multiple angles, producing valuable insights and synergies that enrich their legal education.

“This approach provides Penn Carey Law students broad perspectives that give them the ability to understand the law critically and dynamically, preparing them to practice, lead, and serve at the highest levels in their careers and communities,” said Lee.

Lee also deeply values Penn Carey Law’s strong community . Lee firmly believes that this vibrant culture will play a pivotal role in the Law School’s promising future. She actively cultivates a collegial and inclusive environment that thrives on productive debate and celebrates a diverse range of ideas and experiences. She recognizes that bridging difference and engaging in constructive dialogue is not only an important feature of the Law School’s collegial community but also a hallmark of excellent lawyering.

Lee embraces Penn Carey Law’s approach of grounding legal education in an unwavering commitment to service. She honors and builds on this ethos of service, leadership, and civic engagement by emphasizing the ethical and professional responsibilities all lawyers share to ensure justice under the law. As she looks ahead, Lee wants to ensure that students are instilled with a responsibility to use their legal expertise to advance the public good and to seek opportunities for service and leadership in their careers and communities.

“This is a lifelong commitment. Just as there are many ways to harness legal education across careers, there are also many ways to live out the responsibility to serve.”

Legal History as a Tool for Civility

ee’s passion for legal history is guided by her belief that shining a light on the evolution of our nation’s laws can guide and defuse difficult discussions.

She is particularly engaged in the study of 19th- and 20th-century legal history, which she thinks should prove beneficial in her capacity as dean. “History,” she contends, “can provide a helpful frame for hot-button issues that are otherwise hard to talk about today.”

Lee elaborated, “I find that looking to how people have worked their way through issues in the past can both give us ideas for how we deal with those difficult issues today, as well as offer a terrain on which to have those conversations that may feel a little less raw and emotional.” Using history to facilitate discussion across differences of opinion is fitting given Lee’s consensus-building approach. “I’m always looking for a potential compromise and a path to a win-win solution.”

Lee approaches her new position with her trademark enthusiasm, optimism, and steady demeanor.

Sarah Barringer Gordon, the Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law and Professor of History, Emerita, has long admired Lee’s steadiness and unflappable approach. “I’ve never seen her lose her temper. Never. She always thinks of how best to move a conversation forward,” Gordon said.

As fellow legal historians, Gordon and Lee traveled in the same circles, and their friendship predates Lee’s recruitment to Penn. They first met when Lee, then a graduate student at Yale, presented her work to a panel sponsored by the American Society for Legal History, designed to highlight new talent. Gordon was bowled over. She turned to friend Reva Siegel, Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor of Law at Yale Law School, and exclaimed, “She’s amazing—already a full-fledged scholar and terrific presenter!”

This fact had not eluded Siegel; Lee had been Siegel’s research assistant at Yale. “She had an unerring sense of the important stakes of what she was excavating and could see in small details the possibility of understanding the world differently,” said Siegel, who also served on Lee’s thesis committee.

Lee ascended from graduate student to Penn Carey Law faculty member fairly quickly after Gordon placed Lee before then-Dean Mike Fitts. In the 14 years since, Lee has been incredibly active in the Law School and the University. She has served as Deputy Dean at Penn Carey Law and chaired the Tenure and Promotions Committee. For the University, she was a member of the Social Responsibility Advisory Committee and served on the Committee on Honorary Degrees and the Presidential Professorships Advisory Committee. In addition to her service to the University, Lee has been a productive and perceptive scholar. Her work has been published in leading law reviews and legal history journals, and she has won several awards.

A Pathbreaking Scholar

n 2014, Cambridge University Press published her book The Workplace Constitution from the New Deal to the New Right in its Studies in Legal History series.

Lee also explored workers’ stories to identify their surprising and often forgotten successes in claiming constitutional rights on the job and to explain how, today, most workers nonetheless still lack constitutional protections.

The book connects the civil rights movement’s battle against racial discrimination in the workplace with the right-to-work movement’s efforts to win workers a constitutional right not to join or support a union.

“The ways in which politics historically has shaped law and law has shaped politics, and the dynamics through which people across the political spectrum have influenced each other is important context for understanding the world today,” Lee said.

A Decorated Teacher Who Connects with Students

ee came to the Law School with a predilection for teaching, having taught legal writing as a graduate student. Through the years, she has developed into an empathetic teacher who connects with her students, as evidenced by her receipt of the Harvey Levin Award for Teaching Excellence (2023), Robert A. Gorman Award for Excellence in Teaching (2022), and A. Leo Levin Award for Excellence in An Introductory Course (2019).

In presenting the Harvey Levin Award to Lee at graduation, Tayler Daniels L’23 noted that Lee’s students describe her as someone whose “compassion and investment in her students is evident from the moment she walks through the door.”

On behalf of the class, he added, “Professor Lee’s kindness, grace, and support aren’t just reserved for the students who take her class. She cares and advocates for every student in the school.”

“In these classes, Professor Lee transformed my thinking about the administrative state, legal history, and the role of social movements, politics, and the courts in shaping the law. In ways big and small, she expanded my thinking and challenged my assumptions. My experience at Penn would not have been the same without her.”

How did Lee reach such a high pedagogical station? Lee points to Seth Kreimer, Kenneth W. Gemmell Professor of Law and a veteran of the faculty, as an important mentor in her early years. He fielded a range of her questions, she said, and offered suggestions on how to conduct herself in the classroom.

For his part, Kreimer minimized his role, saying that Lee arrived as a finished product. All he had to do, he said, was “get out of the way of her natural talent and let her capabilities flower.”

“I very rapidly came to have profound respect and personal admiration for Sophia both as a scholar and a person.”

Her vocation as a legal historian combined with the wisdom she gained from the study and practice of social work, Kreimer added, gives Lee the foresight to understand students, the depth of knowledge to recognize opportunities, and the habit of mind to “master a series of different intellectual dialects that will help her nurture the faculty.”

“All of this points to Sophia being an extraordinarily good dean who will help us move to the next stage,” Kreimer said.

Siegel of Yale Law also believes that Lee’s package of attributes, including her sharp eye for what history teaches us, will serve her well.

“I expect that her talents as a historian will be predictive of important features of her leadership,” Siegel said. “She’s an astute observer of human relationships and can see a possibility for change that few people can recognize.”

With her elevation to dean, in addition to leading students into the future, Lee will connect with a worldwide network of alumni. “The accomplishments and contributions of Law School graduates through public service, private practice, and business leadership, as well as their staunch support of the Law School, are integral to Penn Carey Law’s excellent reputation,” she said.

Leading Penn Carey Law is a dream job for Lee, who has not been a professor at any other academic institution nor entertained the notion.

“I have pretty deep roots here,” Lee said. “I felt like I won the lottery when I landed at Penn. I deeply appreciate the Law School’s mix of a small-town culture with big-city bustle and ambition. I love that we prize academic excellence but also emphasize and maintain the humanity of the place.”