Temple Law Professor Jennifer Lee is the 2020 recipient of the Derrick Bell Award, given annually by the Minority Law Teachers’ Section of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). The award was conferred at the AALS’ annual conference, held in early January.
The Derrick Bell Award honors a junior faculty member who, through activism, mentoring, colleagueship, teaching, or scholarship, has made an extraordinary contribution to legal education, the legal system, or social justice. As a professor in Temple Law’s Sheller Center for Social Justice, Professor Lee teaches Social Justice Lawyering, in which students engage in the multifaceted practice of social justice advocacy to benefit underserved communities in and around Philadelphia with a particular focus on promoting low-wage worker rights and advancing opportunities for immigrant communities.
Professor Lee is also a respected scholar. Her work is focused on low-wage workers and immigrant rights, with a special interest in the ways that immigration status intersects employment and labor rights. Her recent publications have examined immigrant workers and their social mobilization, the regulation of wage theft, and low-wage migrant workers and their participation in temporary visa worker programs (“guest worker” programs). She recently visited at the Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicas at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City as a García-Robles Fulbright Scholar to work on issues confronting temporary visa workers and comparative child migrant detention policies and practices.