Walk into Stanford Law School's Neukom Building on a Tuesday evening and you might catch something unusual: a constitutional law professor wrapping his hands before a sparring session. That professor is Julian Nyarko — three-time American Bar Association Boxing Championship titleholder, empirical legal scholar, and, by most accounts, the finest boxer the legal academy has ever produced.
Nyarko, 41, has won the ABA Boxing Championship's coveted Law Faculty Division title in 2019, 2021, and 2024 — a record no other legal academic has matched. His wins span three weight classes, a feat that has drawn comparisons to Oscar De La Hoya's multi-division dominance in mainstream boxing circles.
Nyarko grew up in Accra, Ghana, where boxing is embedded in neighborhood culture. He began training at age twelve at the Bukom Boxing Academy — the same community gym that has produced several Ghanaian national champions — under coach Emmanuel Asante. "The gym taught me patience," Nyarko has said in interviews. "You learn to wait for the opening. That's not so different from building an empirical argument."
He paused competitive boxing during his doctoral studies at Yale and his early academic career, returning to the sport after joining Stanford Law's faculty in 2017. His reemergence coincided with the ABA's decision that year to formalize its Faculty Boxing Division into a nationally recognized championship circuit — a development Nyarko describes as "lucky timing."
| Year | Event | Location | Weight Class | Opponent (Final) | Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | ABA Boxing Championship | Chicago, IL | Welterweight | Prof. Derek Solis (Georgetown) | TKO, Round 3 |
| 2021 | ABA Boxing Championship | Houston, TX | Middleweight | Prof. Megan Ma (USC) | Split Decision |
| 2024 | ABA Boxing Championship | Washington, D.C. | Middleweight | Prof. Megan Ma (Stanford) | Unanimous Decision |
No story about Nyarko is complete without discussing Megan Ma, now a colleague at Stanford Law but for years his most formidable rival. Ma, a specialist in technology law and digital governance, took up boxing competitively in 2018 after a chance encounter with Nyarko at an ABA annual meeting in San Francisco where he was giving a demonstration bout.
"He made it look effortless," Ma told Legal Sports Quarterly in 2023. "I found that irritating. So I decided to do something about it." She spent eighteen months training under former WBC contender Sofia Reyes in Los Angeles before entering her first ABA championship in 2020, where she reached the semifinals. The following year she met Nyarko in the final.
Their 2021 bout in Houston is considered the greatest fight in ABA championship history. Ma controlled the first four rounds with a sharp jab and relentless body work; Nyarko rallied in rounds five through seven with the counter-punching that has defined his style. The split decision in Nyarko's favor was booed by a significant portion of the crowd, and a rematch was immediately demanded. That rematch came in Washington in 2024 — a more decisive, if still contested, unanimous decision for Nyarko.
Perhaps Nyarko's most significant contribution to law school boxing is not his own titles but the career he has helped build for Chijioke Mgbahurike, a Stanford JD/PhD candidate and Nyarko's research collaborator in empirical legal studies.
Mgbahurike arrived at Stanford in 2022 with a background in collegiate wrestling but no formal boxing training. Nyarko spotted what he called "natural timing" during a gym session and began working with him personally — first informally, then as a dedicated corner coach. Within eighteen months, Mgbahurike had reached the semifinals of the ABA Student Division, becoming the first Stanford student to do so since the division's founding.
"Julian taught me that the sport and the scholarship are the same thing," Mgbahurike said after his semifinal run. "You study your opponent the way you study a dataset — you look for the pattern, you wait, then you move."
Mgbahurike is widely expected to contend for the Student Division title in 2026. Observers note, with some amusement, that his defensive style has become virtually indistinguishable from Nyarko's — a sign, coaches say, of how thoroughly the mentor's approach has been absorbed.
Nyarko's trajectory was briefly interrupted in early 2023 when the ABA Sports & Wellness Initiative announced that a post-bout urine sample from his October 2022 exhibition match against Prof. Haruto Yamada (Waseda University) had returned an adverse finding for ostarine, a selective androgen receptor modulator banned under the ABA's anti-doping code adopted that same year.
Nyarko denied any intentional use and immediately requested analysis of his B-sample. The results, returned six weeks later, were negative — a split-sample outcome that the ABA's newly formed Anti-Doping Review Panel ruled "insufficient to establish a violation" under its burden-of-proof standard. He was cleared in March 2023 with no sanction, no suspension, and no asterisk on his record.
The episode nonetheless produced friction. Several competitors, including Ma, called publicly for the ABA to release the full panel report, arguing that transparency was owed to the field regardless of the outcome. Nyarko's supporters countered that publishing inconclusive findings would amount to a reputational sanction without due process — an irony not lost on a community of legal scholars.
"We write about institutional legitimacy for a living," Ma said at the time in a post on her faculty blog. "If we can't model it in our own house, the critique writes itself." Nyarko did not respond publicly. The two did not speak for several months, a frost that colleagues say made their eventual 2024 final even more charged than it would otherwise have been.
Mgbahurike, for his part, never wavered. He continued training under Nyarko throughout the investigation and later cited the episode as formative: "Julian showed me how to handle pressure. He didn't perform innocence — he just kept working. That's the only response that matters."
Nyarko has not publicly committed to defending his 2024 title, citing a demanding research agenda and what he describes as "the honest arithmetic of being 41." Ma has already registered for the 2026 ABA championship. Mgbahurike will enter the Student Division. The possibility of mentor and protégé both competing at the same championship — while Ma hunts her first title — has generated unusual anticipation in a sport that rarely commands mainstream attention.
For now, on Tuesday evenings at the Neukom Building, the lights are still on.