David Campbell was a State of Franklin official and early territorial and state judge. He served in the Continental army during the Revolutionary War. He served on the new Supreme Court of Franklin in the early 1780s. In 1787 he became a member of the North Carolina Assembly and, later that year, was elected judge of the Superior Court of North Carolina where he served until 1790. When John Tipton and others tried to have John Sevier arrested for treason, Campbell refused to issue the arrest warrant.
Campbell was appointed territorial judge by William Blount in 1790 and served in that position until Tennessee was admitted to the Union in 1796. When the charter of Blount College was issued in 1794, he was named as one of the 18 founding trustees. From 1797 to 1809, he served as superior judge in Tennessee but became embroiled in a bitter dispute with William Blount, John Sevier, and others about the boundary of the Holston Treaty as surveyed in 1797, which placed his home (among others) in Cherokee Territory and led to his eviction by federal troops. Sevier eventually had leaders in the Tennessee House bring impeachment proceedings against Judge Campbell. William Blount was the chief protagonist, but the conviction failed by one vote. A second impeachment trial in 1803 for bribery also failed.