Jane Stapleton is a Distinguished Professor at The Australian National University College of Law, the Ernest E. Smith Professor of Law, University of Texas, School of Law, and a Statutory Visiting Professor and Member of the Law Faculty at Oxford University. She is also an Honorary Bencher of Gray's Inn. For a decade she taught law at Balliol College Oxford where she remains an Emeritus Fellow. In 2000 she was elected a Member of the American Law Institute and in 2004 she was appointed to the Council of the Institute, the first foreigner to be elected to this body.

She has lectured and published widely, and her work has been cited with approval by appellate courts in many common law jurisdictions, in academic publications and Reports of Law Commissions. She was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia in 2007 and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law in 2010. In 2011-12 she was Arthur Goodhart Visiting Professorship of Legal Science at University of Cambridge. In 2012 she was elected an Honorary Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. In 2013 the Association of American Law Schools bestowed on her the Prosser Award: the Award honours those "who have made an outstanding contribution to the world of tort law scholarship". In 2015 she was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.