Her academic posts have included appointments at Harvard University (1984-1991), UC Berkeley (1991-2014), the Fulbright Professorship in the United Kingdom, the Christensen Fellowship of St. Catherine's College, Oxford, the John K. Castle Chair in Ethics, Politics and Economics at Yale University and she has been a Distinguished Academic Visitor at Queens' College, Cambridge on two occasions.
Stimson's early work focused on the intersection of legal, constitutional, and revolutionary thought in 17th and 18th century Anglo-America.
Her work focused on the study of both English and colonial juries in revolutionary periods and introduced to political theory the concept of "judicial space" as an incisive tool for organizing, interpreting, and evaluating various strands of English and American political thought, and for challenging the assumption of a basic unity of vision at the roots of Anglo-American jurisprudence.
This work, undertaken together with Cambridge economist Murray Milgate, has emphasized one set of conceptual transformations in politics and political economy that took place during a part of what has been called the classical period of political economy, and directly challenged the casual association of Smith's name and ideological imprimatur with contemporary neoclassical and neoconservative economic arguments for the reestablishment of an "invisible hand" as the prime regulator of complex national and globalized markets, as well as the unsubstantiated belief in a putatively Smithian inspired version of perfect competition to promote efficiency in the allocation of resources such that all would be fully utilized to the greatest social and individual benefit.
The importance of her work on this topic has been recognized in 2011 with its receipt of the David and Elaine Spitz Prize from the International Conference for the Study of Political Thought.