Stanford Law School Professor Jud Campbell, JD ’11, has been named the winner of Stanford Law School’s 2025 Barbara Allen Babcock Award for Excellence in Teaching. Based on student feedback, the Babcock Award is given to instructors who teach first-year courses and who promote “inclusion of learning, intellectual rigor and commitment to the highest standards of professional integrity, mentorship and service.”

Campbell teaches Constitutional Law and Property in the 1L curriculum. He is a legal historian whose scholarship explores American constitutional thought, with particular attention to the history of rights. His work explores older ways of thinking about natural law, natural rights, and general fundamental law, illuminating broad shifts in how Americans have understood constitutional law. His 2017 Yale Law Journal article, “Natural Rights and the First Amendment,” has been widely recognized for reshaping scholarly understandings of free speech at the Founding.

The Babcock Award was established in 2020 in honor of the first woman appointed to the faculty of Stanford Law School. Babcock, the Judge John Crown Professor of Law, emerita, passed away in 2020. She was a pioneering lawyer and much-loved law professor, described in her New York Times obituary as “a force for women in the law.”

“I’m incredibly grateful for this recognition,” Campbell said. “Teaching is the best part of the job for me. Working with students and helping them think through different ways of approaching the law is what makes this work meaningful.”

Campbell curates his own teaching materials for his Constitutional Law class rather than using a traditional casebook. “We still cover all the traditional cases, but my goal is to add something more,” he said. “I try to use the class as a way to help students think through the broad shifts that we’ve seen in constitutional law and think about the relationship between the constitutional text and other sources of fundamental law. 

“Jud exemplifies the scholar-teacher ideal,” said George Triantis, JSD ’89, the Richard E. Lang Professor of Law and Dean of Stanford Law School. “His historical work is reshaping how we understand constitutional law, and he brings the same creativity and rigor to the classroom. Students see him as a mentor who challenges them, supports them, and inspires them to think more deeply about the law.”

Statements from Stanford Law students who nominated Campbell for the award included: 

“He welcomed all students’ perspectives and made us all feel welcome in class…. Creat[ing] a nurturing learning environment.”

“Jud is a generationally talented professor. Usually a doctrinal instructor is good at either clear frameworks or deep intellectual discussion. Jud is extraordinary at both. Not only were lectures on doctrinally tricky topics (e.g., estates) perfectly lucid, but discussions of more theoretical cases were profound. Every time Jud led us down a new perspective or theory on a cornerstone case, I genuinely felt like my mind was blown.”

He conducted office hours “every single day after class, which is more than any other professor I have had, and he approached every single class with a clear sense of excitement and care.”

Campbell was also the recipient of the Federalist Society’s 2025 Joseph Story Award, which annually honors one early-career scholar for exceptional achievement in legal scholarship, teaching, and public engagement.

About Barbara Babcock

Professor Barbara Babcock was the first woman appointed to the regular faculty, as well as the first to hold an endowed chair and the first emerita at Stanford Law School. Babcock, a civil and criminal procedure scholar, was a pioneer in the study of women in the legal profession. Before joining the Stanford faculty in 1972, Babcock served as the first director of the Public Defender Service of the District of Columbia. On leave from Stanford, she was assistant attorney general for the Civil Division in the U.S. Department of Justice in the Carter administration. Babcock was a four-time winner of the John Bingham Hurlbut Award for Excellence in Teaching at SLS. Among other books, she wrote Woman Lawyer: The Trials of Clara Foltz (Stanford Press, 2011), a biography of the first woman lawyer in the west, and the founder of the public defender movement. 

About Stanford Law School

Stanford Law School is one of the world’s leading institutions for legal scholarship and education. Its alumni are among the most influential decision makers in law, politics, business, and high technology. Faculty members argue before the Supreme Court, testify before Congress, produce outstanding legal scholarship and empirical analysis, and contribute regularly to the nation’s press as legal and policy experts. Stanford Law School has established a model for legal education that provides rigorous interdisciplinary training, hands-on experience, global perspective and a focus on public service.