“How did I become the public defender in the nation’s capital at the age of 30? The fact is, no one else could afford to do it. The salary was set at $16,000 a year, and the other applicants were all family men whose wives were homemakers,” said Professor Barbara Allen Babcock, the first Director of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia and the first female professor at Stanford Law School, in her May 16 address to the Class of 2004 during the School’s graduation ceremony in Stanford University’s Memorial Auditorium.

“So I hired the best male contender as my deputy, paid him almost three times what I made and delegated the hard, boring tasks while I defended precious freedom in the courts before juries,” Babcock said with her trademark candor, inviting the crowd of some 1,800 family and friends to laugh. 

Babcock, Judge John Crown Professor of Law, was voted bythe graduating class to receive the John Bingham Hurlbut Award for Excellence in Teaching, making her the first four-time winner. She is also retiring this year to become Stanford Law School’s first Professor Emerita. 

Its own pathbreaking accomplishments set the Class of 2004 apart from any other, Babcock noted. Fifty-three percent of the graduates are women— the highest percentage in the history of the Law School—and a remarkable number compared with the 4 percent enrolled in law schools at the time Babcock graduated. 

Moreover, Babcock noted, because the 2004 graduates started Law School just days before September 11, they formed an unshakable bond—a sense of community that was manifested by a 98 percent participation rate in the 2004 class gift, shattering all records at the Law School and the University. 

“You as a class have been unusually tolerant and understanding, interested in and supportive of each other,” she said. “That you came together as a class in a momentous time—September 2001—reminds me of Salman Rushdie’s novel about the children born at midnight in 1947, when India declared its independence from Great Britain. Midnight’s children . . . share a special vision, an inward experience that sets them apart for life.”

Among those who participated in the ceremony were 176 candidates for the degree of Doctor of Jurisprudence (JD); 20 for the degree of Master of Laws (LLM), with 10 focusing on corporate law and business and 10 focusing on law, science, and technology; 14 for the degree of Master of the Science of Law (JSM); and seven for the degree of Doctor of the Science of Law (JSD). The graduates will receive their degrees this summer, pending the issuance of final grades.