Barbara Babcock
- Judge John Crown Professor of Law, Emerita
Expertise
- Access to Justice
- Civil Procedure & Litigation
- Complex Litigation
- Constitutional Criminal Procedure
- Ethics & Professional Responsibility
- Evidence
- Federal Courts & Federal Jurisdiction
- Gender & Sexual Orientation Discrimination
- Law & Literature
- Law & Rhetoric
- Law & Society
- Legal Profession
- Prosecutorial Ethics
- Race & Ethnicity Discrimination
- Supreme Court
- Trial Advocacy & Skills Training
Biography
Remembering Barbara Allen Babcock, First Woman Member of Stanford Law Faculty and Legal Trailblazer
Share a memory, anecdote, or story of Professor Barbara Babcock
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, Barbara Babcock has taught and written in both the fields of civil and criminal procedure for many years. She has also pioneered the study of women in the legal profession. Most notably, Babcock is the author of 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.
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. Upon her graduation from law school, she clerked for Judge Henry Edgerton of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and worked for the noted criminal defense attorney, Edward Bennett Williams. Professor Babcock is a distinguished teacher, being a four-time winner of the John Bingham Hurlbut Award for Excellence in Teaching at Stanford Law School. She is also a recipient of the Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award.
Education
- BA University of Pennsylvania 1960
- LLB Yale Law School 1963
Barbara Babcock’s Memoir “Fish Raincoats”
The life and times of a trailblazing feminist in American law. The first female Stanford law professor was also first director of the District of Columbia Public Defender Service, one of the first women to be an Assistant Attorney General of the United States, and the biographer of California’s first woman lawyer, Clara Foltz. Survivor, pioneer, leader, and fervent defender of the powerless and colorful mobsters alike, Barbara Babcock led by example and by the written word—and recounts her part of history in this candid and personal memoir.
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History of public defender role during Jackson hearings
The Washington Post
Women in law have come a long way since Foltz’s speech, when she was only one of about 200 women lawyers across the country, compared with 90,000 men, according to research by the late Stanford Law professor Barbara Babcock, who wrote a biography on Foltz. In recent years, women have…
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