Thomas R. Lee is the Rex & Maureen Rawlinson Professor of Law at Brigham Young University. He is a former Justice of the Utah Supreme Court, a former Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Division of the United States Department of Justice, and a former member of the Advisory Committee on the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.
In his judicial opinions and legal scholarship, Lee has been an innovator at the intersection of law and linguistics. His judicial opinions and scholarship have advocated the use of theories and tools used by linguists in interpreting the language of law. See Judging Ordinary Meaning, 127 YALE L. J. 788 (2018) (co-authored with Stephen Mouritsen); Data-Driven Originalism, 167 PENN. L. REV. 261 (2019) (co-authored with James Phillips); and The Corpus and the Critics, 88 U. CHI. L. REV. 275 (2021) (co-authored with Stephen Mouritsen). And his work has now been cited in state and federal courts throughout the nation.
Before becoming a law professor in 1997, Lee clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas and for Fourth Circuit Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III.
Lee has argued in trial and appellate courts throughout the country and in the United States Supreme Court.