Professor Jud Campbell Wins 2025 Joseph Story Award

The Federalist Society is delighted to announce that the winner of the 2025 Joseph Story Award is Professor Jud Campbell of Stanford Law School. The annual award recognizes a junior academic (ten years or less on the tenure track or 40 and under) who has demonstrated excellence in legal scholarship, a commitment to teaching, a concern for students, and who has made a significant public impact in a manner that advances the rule of law in a free society. It is named for Joseph Story, who was appointed to the Supreme Court at the age of 32, served as the first Dane Professor of Law at Harvard, and wrote Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States. The Story Award is the successor to the Paul M. Bator Award, established in 1989 in memory of Professor Bator for similar purposes.

Rex Dyches, the 2025 Joseph Story Award Chair at the University of Chicago and student member of the selection committee, presented the award to Professor Campbell on March 8 at the Federalist Society’s 44th Annual National Student Symposium. The Symposium was hosted by the University of Michigan’s Federalist Society Student Chapter.

Mr. Dyches began by detailing Professor Campbell’s impressive scholarly contributions in constitutional law with articles published in the Yale Law Journal, the Harvard Law Review, and other journals. Mr. Dyches highlighted one of Professor Campbell’s most thought-provoking articles, Natural Rights and the First Amendment, where Professor Campbell challenged our contemporary understandings of how the Founders viewed the speech and press freedoms of the First Amendment. He noted that despite those freedoms being “expansive in scope,” they generally allowed for restrictions on expression to promote the public good.

Mr. Dyches also took note of Professor Campbell’s role as a “powerful unifying force for the public good.” At a time when polarization is the norm, Professor Campbell’s scholarship engages with and is highly respected by scholars and lawyers with widely different perspectives and approaches to constitutional law. Proponents and critics of originalism are interested in Professor Campbell’s work and recognize his significant contributions. This is a testament to his scholarly curiosity and determination to understand the historical evidence on its own terms.

Finally, Mr. Dyches discussed Professor Campbell’s work as a dedicated teacher and mentor to his students. As an untenured professor at the University of Richmond, as a visiting professor at the University of Chicago and Harvard Law School, and now as a tenured professor at Stanford Law School, Professor Campbell has built strong connections with students both in and out of the classroom, engaging them in his research and being a resource to them as current students and alumni. Dyches finished his remarks by saying that “Professor Campbell’s unwavering dedication to his students serves as a commendable example for all to follow.”

In accepting the award, Professor Campbell began by remarking how humbled he was to “join so many wonderful past honorees of the Joseph Story Award.”

Professor Campbell focused his remarks on one of the main themes of his research: how the Founders thought differently about constitutionalism and the common good than we do in America today. He began by laying out how the Founders did not see the Constitution only as a legal document to be interpreted by the judiciary. Instead of treating politics and constitutional law as two separate domains, the Founders took a different view.

Discussing Madison’s Federalist 51, Professor Campbell highlighted that Madison “didn’t even mention judicial review” despite the entire paper focusing on constitutional enforcement. Instead, Madison centered this essay on “institutional design” that shaped political relationships and fostered certain ways of thinking. This insight is critical to understanding the Constitution and the Founders. As Professor Campbell put it, in the Framers’ view, “fidelity to the Constitution depends far more on constitutional culture, both within the government and in the public at large, and less on judicial enforcement.”

This constitutional culture, Professor Campbell continued, was the reason the Founders were “obsessed with education, and with other ways of developing civic virtue, including religion.”

He then turned to his second topic: the common good. The Founders believed that political society was created to advance the common good, and it became the Founders’ “constitutional north star.” To achieve this goal, they had to reject corruption and tribalism and instead consider “everyone’s interests equally, and only then discern[] the good of the whole.” When Madison warned against majorities “violating the rights of minorities,” he was not discussing judicially enforceable constitutional rights. Rather, he was warning against the majority discarding the common good and enabling or allowing factions to gather wealth and political power for themselves.

Professor Campbell concluded his remarks by reminding the audience that Madison knew that men were not angels and that self-interest can sometimes serve a useful role. However, constitutionalism was more than a rulebook for the people to follow. It was about using political power justly, for proper reasons, with an equal regard for all our fellow Americans. Professor Campbell ended with some advice and a call for action:

Today, we’ve taken such a narrow view of constitutionalism.

Constitutional law only sets the political ground rules. And otherwise politics is just hardball, and hardball is a competition for power. Norms that aren’t judicially enforceable are disposable, and the trash bin is rapidly filling up.

And I really worry about what our political system has lost without a broader constitutional culture and without our Founders’ constitutional guiding star.

We can do better.

The Founders appreciated that politics won’t ever be perfect. But “more perfect” self-government is always achievable and very much worth pursuing. And that responsibility resides with all of us.

We can still debate the meaning of “commerce” or “executive power,” or what methods of constitutional interpretation to follow. And those debates really do matter. But as constitutional problems go, they pale in comparison to having a political order dominated by tribalism, with a lost sense of common purpose.

And it’s on all of us to do better—to not let ourselves get siloed; to understand and care about each other, especially across differences; and to not lose faith in a better tomorrow.