The main contribution of the paper is the development of a new margin‐based classifier called distance‐weighted discrimination (DWD) for functional data classification. The proposed classifier employs functional principal component analysis (FPCA) to reduce the dimensionality of the functional data and is free of the restrictive assumptions imposed by Bayes classifiers in terms of mean and covariance functions. Theoretical results show that the proposed classifier is Bayes risk consistent under mild assumptions. Simulation studies and real data examples demonstrate that the DWD classifier outperforms several conventional classifiers in terms of prediction accuracy. Overall, the paper provides a new approach for functional data classification with good empirical performance.