Thomas Rex Lee

Thomas Rex Lee (born December 1964) is a former American jurist who was a justice of the Utah Supreme Court from 2010 to 2022. Lee is also a lecturer on law at Harvard Law School and an adjunct professor/distinguished lecturer at Brigham Young University's (BYU) J. Reuben Clark Law School (JRCL) following his appointment to the bench. Lee is a pioneer in law and corpus linguistics—the application of corpus linguistics to determine ordinary meaning in statutes—being the first American judge to do so in an opinion. Early life, education, and career Thomas Rex Lee was born in 1964 to Janet (née Griffin) and Rex E. Lee. He grew up in Arizona, Utah, and Northern Virginia. Lee attended Brigham Young University, graduating in 1988 with a Bachelor of Arts summa cum laude in economics. He then attended the University of Chicago Law School, where he was an editor of the University of Chicago Law Review and graduated in 1991 with a Juris Doctor degree with high honors. After law school, Lee clerked for J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit from 1991 to 1992. He then entered private practice at the Salt Lake City-based law firm of Kimball, Parr, Waddoups, Brown & Gee, taking a one-year leave of absence to serve as a law clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1994 to 1995. He became a shareholder at Kimball, Parr, Waddoups, Brown & Gee in 1995, a position he would hold until 1997 when he left the firm to join the faculty at BYU's JRCL. At the law school, Lee taught courses in Civil Procedure and Intellectual Property Law, and a seminar on the United States Supreme Court. He also served as Associate Dean (2008-2010) and was named the Rex and Maureen Rawlinson Professor of Law. Following his 2010 appointment to the bench Lee remained a Distinguished Lecturer in Law at the JRCL.