Barbara Babcock, legal trailblazer, dies at 81

Barbara Babcock, a legal trailblazer and champion for gender equality who became the first director of the D.C. Public Defender Service and first female faculty member at Stanford Law School, died April 18 at her home in Stanford, Calif. She was 81.

Her death was announced by Stanford University, which said she had cancer.

When Babcock studied at Yale Law School in the early 1960s, women made up less than 5% of the country’s law students and “sex discrimination” scarcely existed as a concept. Male classmates asked why she bothered to pursue a career in the law, let alone in criminal defense, and few judges seemed interested in offering clerkships to women.

Yet over the next decade, Babcock helped usher in a new era for women in the legal profession. As one of only a few female criminal lawyers in Washington, she built what was arguably the country’s preeminent public-defender service, offering indigent defendants the same level of service they could expect from white-shoe firms. At Stanford, where she began teaching in 1972, she brought a feminist approach and a focus on civil rights.

“In my opinion — shared by many — she was the best legal educator of her generation and beyond,” said Toni M. Massaro, a former dean of the University of Arizona’s law school who co-authored a civil procedure textbook with Babcock. In an email, she added that Babcock was “charismatic, inspirational, unforgettable, unique and above all committed to students’ personal and professional well-being.”

Babcock mentored “countless students at Stanford who were often living in the shadows” as a result of their gender, sexuality or race, said Mark G. Kelman, a professor and vice dean at the university’s law school. “Her obvious charisma, coupled with a oneon-one authenticity that few charismatics possess, made her beloved by hundreds of students in a way no other professor I’ve known is beloved, even the most gifted ones.”

Carter’s Justice Department

An expert on criminal and civil procedure, Babcock taught some of the country’s first “women and the law” courses and co-wrote a landmark 1975 textbook, “Sex Discrimination and the Law.” She also helped found Equal Rights Advocates, a San Francisco-based legal organization dedicated to ending sex discrimination, and went on leave during the administration of President Jimmy Carter to join the Justice Department as assistant attorney general in charge of the civil division.

“I was often asked what it ‘felt like to get my job because I was a woman,’” Babcock later wrote in a blog post. “I developed a stock answer: ‘It’s far better than not getting it because I’m a woman.’ “

Barbara Allen Babcock was born in Washington on July 6, 1938. She was raised in part by her grandparents in Hope, Ark., her mother’s hometown, while her father served in the Navy during World War II and her mother worked a government clerical job in Washington.

The family eventually settled in Hyattsville, Md., where her father “made being a lawyer seem both heroic and fun,” tackling murder cases as well as mundane incorporation issues.

Babcock received a bachelor’s degree in 1960 from the University of Pennsylvania. After graduating from Yale in 1963, she clerked at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit for Judge Henry W. Edgerton, one of the few federal judges of his era to hire female and African American clerks.

As assistant attorney general, Babcock supervised 700 lawyers, presiding over “the world’s largest law firm,” as she called it. She also encouraged Carter to appoint minorities and women — including future Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — to the federal bench.