Lee Epstein is the Provost Professor of Law and Political Science and the Rader Family Trustee Chair in Law at the University of Southern California. She is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

A recipient of twelve grants from the National Science Foundation for her work on law and legal institutions, Epstein has authored or co-authored over 100 articles and essays, as well as 14 books, including The Choices Justices Make, which won the Pritchett Award for the Best Book on Law and Courts and, more recently, the Lasting Contribution Award "for a book or journal article, 10 years or older, that has made a lasting impression on the field of law and courts." The Constitutional Law for a Changing America series (co-authored with Thomas Walker) received the Teaching and Mentoring Award from the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association; and The Supreme Court Compendium was the recipient of an Outstanding Academic Book Award from Choice. Her book with Jeff Segal, Advice and Consent: The Politics of Judicial Appointments (Oxford University Press), received extensive media coverage, with its findings reported in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, among other outlets. She is now working on three projects: Case Selection on the Supreme Court (with Jeffrey Segal and Harold Spaeth), A Macro-Theory of the Courts: How National and Local Trends Affect Judicial Decisions (with Thomas Brennan and Nancy Staudt), and Are Judges Realists? An Empirical Study (with William M. Landes and Richard A. Posner).

Professor Epstein is a Co-Editor of the Journal of Law, Economics & Organization; Vice-President of the International Society for New Institutional Economics; a member of the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Political and Social Science; chair of the Law School Admission Council’s Grants Subcommittee; Principal Investigator of the National Science Foundation funded project on the U.S. Supreme Court Database; and a member of the editorial boards of American Politics Research, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and Social Science Quarterly. She is a former chair of the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association and a past President of the Midwest Political Science Association.