After graduating in law from the ANU she joined the federal Attorney General's Department first in Advisings and then General Counsel. After graduating from Oxford, she briefly lectured at the University of Sydney Law School and then returned to the UK, where in 1987 she was elected a Fellow of Balliol College and taught at the University of Oxford until 1997, rising to the position of Reader in Law. From 1997 to 2016 she held a Research Chair in Law at the Australian National University where she is now an Emeritus Distinguished Professor. From 2002 to 2015 she was the Ernest E. Smith Professor of Law at the University of Texas at Austin. She remained a Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford from 1997-2015. She has held a number of visiting professorships including at Harvard Law School, Columbia Law School,the European University Institute and at the University of Cambridge, where she was the Arthur Goodhart Visiting Professor of Legal Science. In March 2016, Stapleton was elected the 38th Master of Christ's College, Cambridge, succeeding Frank Kelly. She assumed the position in September 2016. Her research has focused on tort law. Other specialisms include comparative law. She retains her early interest in compensation for non-traumatic injuries, such as drug-induced injury and cancer, and her subsequent interest in product liability. She also studies the philosophical principles underlying common law, including duty and the relationship of causation to consequences. Her publications include the books Disease and the Compensation Debate and Products Liability. She was a co-editor of OUP's Clarendon Law Series.
Personal life
She is married to , also a law professor. They have a son and a daughter.
Awards and honours etc
In 1995 she won the Wedderburn Prize for the best article published that year in the Modern Law Review. In 2000 she was elected a Member of the American Law Institute. In 2004 she was elected the first non-US Member of the ALI Council, of which she remains a Member. In 2009 she was elected an Honorary Bencher of Gray's Inn. In 2010 she was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law. In 2012 she was elected an Honorary Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. In 2013 Stapleton was the first non-US recipient to receive the William L. Prosser Award of the Association of American Law Schools. She became a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2015. In 2016, the American Bar Association bestowed on her the Robert B. McKay Law Professor Award, which honours "those attorneys who have shown commitment to the advancement of justice, scholarship and the legal profession, demonstrated by outstanding contributions to the fields of tort and insurance law". In 2018 she was awarded the John Fleming Prize in Tort Law, a biennial international award for outstanding contributions to the field of tort law. In 2018, the University of Adelaide bestowed on her the degree of Doctor of Laws in acknowledgement of distinguished service to the law in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. In 2018 she delivered the Clarendon Law Lectures in the University of Oxford. In 2020 she was appointed an Honorary Queen's Counsel by Her Majesty.
