Fred Smith Jr., JD ’07, is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and a leading scholar of the federal courts. His work has reoriented contemporary debates on abstention, governmental immunities, and the allocation of power between state and federal courts. This work has recovered histories the field had forgotten, and centered people the field’s doctrines had rendered invisible. He co-authors Federal Courts in Context (with Erwin Chemerinsky, Seth Davis, and Norman Spaulding) and Constitutional Torts, now in its sixth edition (with Sheldon Nahmod, Tom Eaton, Noah Smith-Drelich, and Michael Wells). He is also an important voice in the growing field of posthumous legal interests, where he created the first law school course of its kind.

His scholarship has appeared in the California Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Harvard Law Review, Michigan Law Review, New York University Law Review, Stanford Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, and Yale Law Journal, among others. He lectures on these subjects across the United States and internationally, including in Istanbul, Shanghai, and Warsaw, and is regularly consulted as an expert by major media outlets, including CBS News, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, Time, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.

Smith clerked for Judge Myron Thompson (M.D. Ala.), Judge Barrington D. Parker Jr. (2d Cir.), and Justice Sonia Sotomayor (U.S. Supreme Court). He has held faculty positions at Berkeley Law and Emory Law and has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, Columbia, and Yale. At Emory, he was named Outstanding Professor of the Year in 2019, 2022, and 2023.

Smith serves as Board Chair of Lambda Legal, the nation’s oldest and largest legal organization dedicated to the civil rights of LGBTQ people. He also serves as an Associate Reporter for the American Law Institute’s Restatement of Constitutional Torts.