Thomas R. Lee is the Rex J. and Maureen E. Rawlinson Professor of Law at BYU Law School. He previously served as a Justice of the Utah Supreme Court, where he was appointed by Governor Gary Herbert in 2010 and later served as Associate Chief Justice. He is a leading scholar of law and corpus linguistics, and his work on ordinary meaning and data-driven interpretation has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, the University of Chicago Law Review, and the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.

Justice Lee graduated with high honors from the University of Chicago Law School in 1991. After law school, he served as a law clerk for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, III, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and then for Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court. He then joined the law firm now known as Parr, Brown, Gee & Loveless, where he became a shareholder before joining the BYU law faculty.

During his years as a full-time law professor, he maintained a part-time intellectual property litigation practice and developed an appellate practice, arguing numerous cases in federal courts throughout the country and in the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2004–05, he served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.