Dana Lee is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Her research interests generally include social and intellectual history of the Near East, Islamic legal history and theory, comparative law, and the relationship between law and ethics. Her dissertation traces the development of the concept of necessity in the Islamic legal tradition, its employment in legal discourses and cases, and its invocation on behalf of those accused of civil or criminal wrongdoing. More broadly, her research explores how jurists resolved tensions and negotiated the relationship between stability and rule of law, social demands, and the claim of divinely and ethically ordained engagement with human action. Dana holds a B.A. from the University of Notre Dame in Political Science and Chinese; a J.D. from UCLA School of Law; and an M.T.S. from Harvard University Divinity School in Islamic Studies.