Image of Barbara A. Babb

Professor Babb, founder and director of the Sayra and Neil Meyerhoff Center for Families, Children and the Courts (CFCC) and director of the Post-J.D. Certificate in Family Law, joined the University of Baltimore School of Law faculty in 1989 after three years as managing attorney of the Domestic Law Unit at the Legal Aid Bureau in Baltimore, Maryland. Prior to that, she was in private practice for several years with a law firm in New York. Babb teaches several courses in the family law area, including Family Law, Child and the Family, and the CFCC Student Fellows Program I and II. She has led the design and development of the nation's only Post-J.D. Certificate in Family Law, and she now directs the program. She has been a visiting professor at the George Washington University School of Law and has taught in UB's program in Aberdeen, Scotland.

Professor Babb's scholarship focuses on an interdisciplinary, holistic approach to family law through the application of therapeutic jurisprudence, the ecology of human development, and the creation of unified family courts. She is the author (with Judith D. Moran) of Caring for Families in Court: An Essential Approach to Family Justice (2019), a book that envisions the family court as a care center, blending contemporary theories with an ethic of care and narrative practice.

In 2016, the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts (AFCC) appointed Professor Babb editor-in-chief of Family Court Review.  Babb also serves on the Curriculum Committee of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ). She is a past Chair and current Executive Committee Member of the Family and Juvenile Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS), and she has co-chaired the In House Clinics Committee of the AALS Section on Clinical Legal Education. Babb has served as a member of the Family and Juvenile Law Section Council of the Maryland State Bar Association and has co-chaired the Family Courts Committee of the American Bar Association's (ABA) Section of Family Law. She has served as an Advisory Council member and member of the ABA's Standing Committee on Substance Abuse and has participated in that committee's model national unified family court project. Leading CFCC’s consulting and technical assistance work, Babb has participated in court and law reform projects in Maryland, nationally, and internationally. She is a co-founder of the court based program to assist self-represented family law litigants that currently operates in all of Maryland's Circuit Courts.