Peter Lee

Peter Lee

Peter Lee is the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Innovation, Law, and Society, at UC Davis School of Law. Professor Lee is a leading expert in innovation law and policy, with a research focus on patent law, intellectual property, technology transfer, and artificial intelligence. He is the founding director of the Center for Innovation, Law, and Society and an elected member of the American Law Institute.

Professor Lee’s scholarship explores the social implications of innovation and the structure of creative industries. His work has appeared in many of the nation's top legal publications, including The Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, California Law Review, and Michigan Law Review. His contributions to the field have been recognized with the Samsung-Stanford Patent Prize and the UC Davis Chancellor’s Fellowship.

Beyond his research, Professor Lee has held visiting positions at the University of Oxford, Seoul National University, and Melbourne Law School. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and an undergraduate degree in the history and philosophy of science from Harvard University. Before entering academia, he served as a clerk for Judge Barry G. Silverman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Columns by Peter Lee

Permalink to Better than the Real Thing? The Promises and Perils of Synthetic Data

Better than the Real Thing? The Promises and Perils of Synthetic Data

9 Feb 2026

Peter Lee

UC Davis Law professor Peter Lee discusses the growing use of synthetic data to train AI models and its advantages over real-world data in addressing technical limitations and legal issues like privacy, bias, and copyright infringement. Professor Lee argues that while synthetic data offers promising solutions through unlimited, high-quality training content, it also poses significant risks including model collapse, new biases, and enabling dangerous AI applications, requiring careful regulation and responsible deployment.