Stephanos Bibas

Bibas was born in New York City and spent his summers growing up working for his father, a Greek immigrant who survived the occupation of Greece during World War II, in his family's restaurants. In high school, he became involved in debate and public speaking. He graduated high school at the age of 15 and entered Columbia University.[4]

At Columbia, Bibas was a member of the Philolexian Society and participated in Parliamentary debate. He graduated from Columbia when he was 19 with a Bachelor of Arts in 1989 in political theory, summa cum laude.[5] He then went on to attend University College, Oxford, graduating two years later with a Bachelor of Arts (promoted per tradition to a Master of Arts) in jurisprudence. While at Oxford, Bibas won the 1st place speaker award in the World Debate Championships.

Bibas then attended Yale Law School, where he obtained his Juris Doctor (1994) and was a member of the Yale Law Journal.[6] At Yale Law, Bibas joined the moot court team and won awards for the best oralist and best team, and also served as a symposium editor on the Yale Law Journal.[7]

From 2006 to 2017, Bibas was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He received the Robert A. Gorman Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2008. Bibas previously taught at the University of Chicago Law School and the University of Iowa College of Law and was a research fellow at Yale Law School.[8]

Before beginning his academic career, Bibas was an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, where he successfully prosecuted the world's leading expert in Tiffany stained glass for hiring a grave robber to steal Tiffany windows from cemeteries.[9] Early in his career, Bibas worked as a litigation associate at Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C.[8]

From 1994 to 1995, Bibas clerked for Judge Patrick Higginbotham of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He also clerked for Supreme Court Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy from 1997 to 1998, where he was a co-clerk of Raymond Kethledge.

Bibas is the 15th-most-cited law professor by the U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. Courts of Appeals, and state high courts[10] as well as the 5th-most-cited professor of criminal law and procedure by law professors.[11]

Bibas also directed Penn Law's Supreme Court clinic, for which he litigated a wide range of appellate cases under consideration by the United States Supreme Court. The clinic allows students to assist on real Supreme Court cases, including recruiting, strategising, researching, writing briefs, participating in moot court rehearsals, and attending oral arguments at the Court itself. The Court appointed him to brief and argue Tapia v. United States as amicus curiae.[12] The Court praised Bibas and the clinic for doing "an exceptionally good job"[13] on that case.

Cases argued

• Encino Motorcars v. Navarro (2016)
• Bank of America v. Caulkett (2015)
• Petrella v. MGM, Inc. (2014)
• Vartelas v. Holder (2012)
• Tapia v. United States (2011)
• Turner v. Rogers (2011)

On June 19, 2017, President Donald Trump nominated Bibas to serve as a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, to fill the seat vacated by Judge Midge Rendell, who took senior status on July 1, 2015.[14] On October 4, 2017, a hearing on his nomination was held before the Senate Judiciary Committee.[15] On October 26, 2017, his nomination was reported out of committee by an 11–9 roll call vote.[16] On November 2, 2017, his nomination was confirmed by the United States Senate by a vote of 53–43.[17] He received his judicial commission on November 20, 2017.

Bibas’s judicial writing style has been called “instantly recognizable”; its use of short, punchy sentences and colorful examples aims for "radical clarity." [18] His writing style and typography have been praised as “point[ing] the way to opinions that are more professional-looking and readable.” [19]

As covered in the Wall Street Journal, Bibas has stated: "My boss is not my chief judge. My boss is not my appointing president. My boss is the Constitution and the laws." [20]

Bibas has made several donations to Republicans.[29] He was a member of the Federalist Society from 1991 to 2017.[30] He has also served as a deacon of the Orthodox Church since 2015.[31]

• List of law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States

• Rebooting Justice: More Technology, Fewer Lawyers, and the Future of Law (Encounter Books 2017) ISBN 159403933X: exploring the use of technology and procedural innovation to simplify and streamline complex court procedures to create a cheaper, simpler, faster justice system to control costs.
• Supreme Court, 2011 Term—Comment: Incompetent Plea Bargaining and Extrajudicial Reforms, 126 Harv. L. Rev. 150 (2012): assessing the Supreme Court's recent plea-bargaining jurisprudence and predicting how judicial rulings will likely spur nonjudicial actors to better regulate plea bargaining.
• Machinery of Criminal Justice (Oxford Univ. Press, 2012) ISBN 9780195374681: book about how criminal justice has moved from a lay-driven public morality play to a hidden, amoral, lawyer-run, plea-bargaining assembly line; what the US has lost in its quest for efficiency; and how the nation could swing the pendulum partway back toward greater transparency and public involvement.
• Plea Bargaining Outside the Shadow of Trial (117 Harv. L. Rev.2463 (2004)): explores the agency costs, structural forces, and psychological biases that cause plea bargaining to deviate from expected trial outcomes.
• Integrating Remorse and Apology into Criminal Procedure (114 Yale L.J. 85 (2004)), coauthored with Richard Bierschbach: advocates reforming criminal procedure to encourage more remorse, apology, and reconciliation.
• Prosecutorial Regulation Versus Prosecutorial Accountability (157 U. Pa. L. Rev. 959 (2009)): explores the difficulties with external regulation of prosecutors by legislatures, judges, and bar authorities, and instead proposes ways to make head prosecutors more accountable to the public and to reform the inner workings of prosecutors' offices.

• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Penn Law Celebrates Stephanos Bibas' Confirmation to the Third Circuit (5:48 min). YouTube.com

• Stephanos Bibas at the Biographical Directory of Federal Judges, a public domain publication of the Federal Judicial Center.
• Stephanos Bibas at Ballotpedia
• Appearances at the U.S. Supreme Court from the Oyez Project
• SSRN Author's Page