Stephanos Bibas

Stephanos Bibas (born June 18, 1969) is an American lawyer and jurist serving as a United States circuit judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. He was appointed to the bench in 2017 by President Donald Trump. Before his appointment, he was a professor of law and criminology at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where he was the director of its Supreme Court clinic.

Bibas is a noted scholar of criminal procedure with expertise in criminal charging, plea bargaining, and sentencing. As a professor, he examined how procedural rules written for jury trials have unintended consequences when cases involving jury trials are the exception, rather than the rule, with 95 percent of defendants pleading guilty. Bibas also studied the role of substantive goals such as remorse and apology in criminal procedure. Bibas has been praised for the quality of his legal writing.