Eunice Chaeyoung Lee

Biography

Eunice Lee is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law. Her research centers on migration, citizenship, and borders. Professor Lee engages overlapping areas of immigration, constitutional, administrative, and international human rights law to understand the rights of immigrants and refugees in the United States. As both a legal scholar and anthropologist, she also draws upon social theory and ethnographic methods in her work.

Professor Lee co-directs the law school’s Bacon Immigration Law & Policy Program and its newly-launched Immigration Law certificate program. She is also a co-organizer of the Citizenship & Migration Collaborative Research Network of the Law & Society Association.

In prior practice, Professor Lee was a litigator at the national American Civil Liberties Union Immigrants' Rights Project, where she filed class action constitutional challenges to mandatory immigration detention; and a co-director of the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies at UC Hastings, where she helped lead litigation and advocacy on behalf of asylum seekers. During her time there, she won the 40 Under 40 Award from the national LGBT Bar Association for her work on behalf of transgender refugees. She also previously served as the Albert M. Sacks Fellow at Harvard Law School's Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program. After law school, she clerked for the Hon. Carlos F. Lucero of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.

Professor Lee holds a B.A. from Stanford University, a Ph.D in Anthropology from UC Berkeley, and a J.D. from Yale Law School. She teaches civil procedure, immigration law, and citizenship theory. In 2021, Professor Lee was awarded the Leslie F. and Patricia Bell Faculty Service Award for her contributions to Arizona Law.

Degrees

• Ph.D. Anthropology
• University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California, United States
• Governing Asylum: Spaces of Citizenship in U.S. Law
• J.D.
• Yale Law School, New Haven, Connecticut, United States
• B.A.
• Stanford University, Stanford, California, United States

Awards

• Distinguished Early Career Legal Scholar
• University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law, Spring 2024
• Leslie F. and Patricia Bell Faculty Service Award
• James E. Rogers College of Law, Spring 2021