Thomas H. Lee

Thomas H. Lee is one of the country's leading constitutional, national security and international law scholars and litigators. He is the Leitner Family Professor of International Law at Fordham, where he has taught constitutional law, federal jurisdiction and litigation, international arbitration, international law, national security law, and telecommunications law.  He is also the Co-Director of the Center on Asian Americans and the Law; a partner at Gruenstein Law; and a member of the American Law Institute (elected 2014).  

In 2024, Lee was lead counsel in the first lawsuit to secure a federal court ruling that the Corporate Transparency Act, a federal law requiring millions of businesses to disclose their beneficial owners to the government, was unconstitutional. From 2019 to 2020, he served as Special Counsel to the General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Defense, where he advised on a wide variety of national security law matters.  He has also been a Visiting Professor at Columbia, Harvard and the University of Virginia law schools; a member of the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) Panel of Conciliators; and U.S. Law Adviser to the Constitutional Court of Korea.  He has served as an expert witness in U.S. and foreign litigation and international arbitration regarding the Alien Tort Statute, the American legal system, investment treaty claims and international territorial disputes.

Lee graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College and with honors from Harvard Law School, where he was Articles Chair of the Harvard Law Review. After law school, he clerked for Judge Michael Boudin on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and for Justice David H. Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court.  Before law school, he served as an active-duty U.S. naval cryptology officer aboard submarines and with the National Security Agency.

Selected Publications

Books

• Justifying War (Oxford University Press, forthcoming)

Articles

• The Judicial Power-Admiralty Clause, Heritage Guide to the Constitution (3d ed., forthcoming)
• Congressional Power, Public Rights, and Non-Article III Adjudication, 98 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1113 (2023) (with John Golden)
• Federalism, Private Rights, and Article III Adjudication, 108 Va. L. Rev. 1547 (2022) (with John Golden)
• Article IX, Article III, and the First Congress: The Original Constitutional Plan for the Federal Courts, 1787-1792, 89 Fordham L. Rev. 1895 (2021)
• The United States and Individual and Collective Self-Defense in Northeast Asia in Masahiro Kurosaki and Matthew Waxman, eds., Strengthening the U.S.-Japan Alliance (2021)
• International Law and U.S. Judicial Power in Paul Stephan and Sarah Cleveland, eds., The Fourth Restatement and Beyond (2020).
• In Defense of International Comity, 93 So. Cal. L. Rev. 169 (2020) (with Samuel Estreicher)
• Toward an Interest-Group Theory of Foreign Anti-Corruption Laws, 2019 U. Ill. L Rev. 1227 (with Sean J. Griffith)
• The Law of Nations and the Judicial Branch, 106 Geo. L. J. (2018)
• Natural Born Citizen, 67 Am. U.L. Review 327 (2017)
• Double Remedies in Double Courts, European J. Int'l L, 26 Eur. J. Int'l L. 519 (2015) (with Sungjoon Cho);
• The Law of War and the Responsibility to Protect: A Reinterpretation, 55 Harv. Int'l L. J. 101 (2014)
• The Three Lives of the Alien Tort Statute, 89 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1645 (2014)
• The Safe-Conduct Theory of the Alien Tort Statute, 106 Colum. L. Rev. 830 (2006)
• International Law, International Relations Theory, and Preemptive War: The Vitality of Sovereign Equality Today, 67 Law & Contemp. Probs. 147 (Autumn 2004)
• The Supreme Court of the United States as Quasi-International Tribunal: Reclaiming the Court's Original and Exclusive Jurisdiction over Treaty-Based Suits by Foreign States against States, 104 Colum. L. Rev. 1765 (2004)
• University Dons and Warrior Chieftains: Two Concepts of Diversity, 72 Fordham L. Rev. 2301 (2004)
• Making Sense of the Eleventh Amendment: International Law and State Sovereignty, 96 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1027 (2002)

Book Chapters

• International Arbitration of Patent Claims, in Contemporary Issues in International Arbitration and Mediation: The Fordham Papers 2015 (Arthur W. Rovine, ed., 2016)
• International Law as an Interpretive Tool in the Supreme Court, 1861-1900, in International Law in the U.S. Supreme Court: Continuity and Change (David L. Sloss et al. eds., 2011) (with David L. Sloss)
• The Story of the Prize Cases: Executive Action and Judicial Review in Wartime, in Presidential Power Stories (Curtis Bradley & Chris Schroeder, eds., 2009) (with Michael D. Ramsey)

Symposia and Short Works

• International Relations Theories and International Law
• Fair Winds and Following Seas, Shipmate, 42 Ohio N. U. L. Rev. 877 (2016)
• An Empirical Survey of International Commercial Arbitration Cases in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, 1970-2014, 39 Fordham Int'l L. J. 307 (2015) (with Vera Korzun)
• International Law and Institutions and the American Constitution in War and Peace, 31 Berkeley J. Int'l L. 291 (2013)
• Les relacions intergovernamentals als Estats Units (Inter-governmental relations and collaboration between the States and the National Government in the United States), La colloaboracio entre l'Estat I les Comunitats Autonomes, Consorci Universitat Internacional Menendez Pelayo de Barcelona (2009)
• The Civil War in U.S. Foreign Relations Law: A Dress Rehearsal for Modern Transformations, 53 St. Louis L. J. 53 (2008)
• Countermajoritarian Federalism, 74 Fordham L. Rev. 2123 (2006)
• Teaching Public Law and International Law in the United States, 18 Sungkyunkwan University Law Review 1 (2006)
• The Augustinian Just War Tradition and the Problem of Pretext in Humanitarian Intervention, 28 Fordham Int'l L. J. 756 (2005)
• The Due Process Vagueness Challenge to Chicago's Anti-Gang Loitering Ordinance: Chicago v. Morales, 527 U. S. 41 (1999), 113 Harv. L. Rev. 276 (1999) (student note)
• Bill of Attainder: The Special Provisions of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, SBC Communications, Inc. v. FCC., 154 F. 3d 226 (5th Cir. 1998), 112 Harv. L. Rev. 1385 (1999) (note)
• Translation of Han Young-woo, The Establishment and Development of Korean Nationalist History, Seoul Journal of Korean Studies (1992)