Cynthia Lee

Professor Cynthia Lee is the Edward F. Howrey Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School where she teaches Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Adjudicatory Criminal Procedure, and Professional Responsibility. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Stanford University and a JD from UC Berkeley Law School. Upon graduating from law school, she clerked for Judge Harold M. Fong, then Chief Judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Hawaii. She then served as an associate with Cooper, White & Cooper in San Francisco, California, where she was a member of the firm's criminal defense practice group. Professor Lee started teaching at the University of San Diego School of Law, where she received the Thorsness Prize for Excellence in Teaching. She joined the GW Law faculty in August 2001.

Professor Lee has published in the California Law Review, the NYU Law Review, the University of Illinois Law Review, the UCLA Law Review, the North Carolina Law Review, the George Washington Law Review, and the Minnesota Law Review, among other journals. She is the author or editor of four books, including Criminal Procedure: Cases and Materials (West 2023) (with L. Song Richardson); Criminal Law: Cases and Materials (West 2019) (with Angela Harris); Searches and Seizures: The Fourth Amendment, Its Constitutional History and the Contemporary Debate (Prometheus Books 2011); and Murder and the Reasonable Man: Passion and Fear in the Criminal Courtroom (NYU Press 2003).

Key provisions from a model statute on police use of deadly force she proposed in an article published in 2018 in the Illinois Law Review were incorporated into police reform legislation enacted by Connecticut, Virginia, and the District of Columbia in 2020. Her article, "Firearms and Initial Aggressors", was the subject of a Scholarship Highlight: A New Perspective on the Initial Aggressor Doctrine by Andrew Willinger of the Duke Center for Firearms Law on January 5, 2023. Her model race-switching jury instruction, which she first proposed in a Minnesota Law Review article in1996, appears in the American Bar Association's 2015 Toolbox for Achieving an Impartial Jury.

Professor Lee is a member of the American Law Institute (ALI), the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT), the National Association for Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), and the Asian Pacific American Bar Association of Washington, DC (APABA-DC). Professor Lee served as chair of the AALS Criminal Justice Section in 2008 and was a Member of the AALS Committee on Sections and the Annual Meeting from 2009-2012. She served as Chair of the Multicultural Women's Attorneys Network, a joint project of the ABA Commission on Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Profession and the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession, from 2004-2006.

In the News