Barbara A. Babcock, 1938-2020

Barbara A. Babcock, the first female tenured professor at Stanford Law School and former head of the U.S. Department of Justice civil division, was a pivotal figure in opening doors for women lawyers, including U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Babcock died April 18 after a long fight with cancer. She was 81. Colleagues remembered Babcock as someone with rare gifts as both as a trial attorney and legal educator. Ginsburg credited Babcock with helping her gain a seat on the high court.

"She was loved in the classroom by the students, who felt she really pushed them in a way that was both intellectually rigorous but comforting," said Michael S. Wald, an emeritus professor at Stanford Law. "She was able to weave in stories, her trial practice, but really make you understand what the issue you were discussing in civil procedure or criminal procedure, how it made a difference on the ground."

Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-Washington, D.C., who was Babcock's Yale Law School roommate, released a statement last week remembering Babcock's founding of the D.C. Public Defender Service.

"Barbara led her public defenders in getting 12,000 Vietnam War protesters free from jail and from criminal arrest records following mass arrests found to be unconstitutional. Her reputation led President Carter to appoint Barbara to head the Justice Department's largest division, the Civil Division."

Babcock was a classmate, colleague or friend to a veritable who's who of prominent female attorneys of her generation, also including Children's Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman and LaDoris H. Cordell, the first African-American woman to serve as a Santa Clara Superior Court Judge. Former Peace Corps General Counsel Nancy H. Hendry was a student.

"If you look at the group of women at that time, which there were very few at Yale, they were really exception people. They had to be because the law school admissions process was so biased against women," said Wald, who attended Yale shortly after Babcock and Norton.

Babcock's father was a lawyer in Washington, D.C., where she grew up. After law school she clerked for D.C. Court of Appeals Judge Henry W. Edgerton, then worked as an associate for Edward Bennett Williams, a prominent defense attorney who went on to co-found the renowned D.C. firm Williams & Connolly.

But it was after stepping off this conventional path that she found prominence. Many who knew her said Babcock was motivated by the fight against the Vietnam War and other movements of the time. She left her firm in 1966 to do legal aid and defense work, joining the pilot project that would become the D.C. Public Defender's Service. She became it's first director in 1968.

The work got her noticed. Babcock was invited to teach a class at Georgetown Law School. Stanford Law Dean Thomas J. Ehrlich recruited her in 1972. She became the only four-time winner of the school's John Bingham Hurlbut Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Babcock remained at Stanford for the rest of her career, aside from running the Civil Division of the Justice Department from 1977 to 1979. While there, she urged President Jimmy Carter to appoint more women to the bench -- which he did, including Ginsburg to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

During interviews and speeches later in her life Babcock said she arrived in academia at a pivotal time. Women were starting to enroll in much larger numbers. While she and other female professors did not "set out to be feminists," she told the New York City Bar Association in 2018, their students increasingly demanded courses on women and the law.

She also wrote two books. In 2011 she published "Woman Lawyer: The Trials of Clara Foltz," a biography of the turn-of-the-century public defender and women's movement leader for whom Los Angeles County's main criminal court building is named. Babcock's 2016 memoir was titled "Fish, Raincoats: A Woman Lawyer's Life."

Babcock is survived by her husband, Stanford Law Emeritus Professor Thomas C. Grey; her stepdaughter, Rebecca Grey; and two brothers.