Speaker details

Biography

Deborah R. Hensler is the Judge John W. Ford Professor of Dispute Resolution and Associate Dean for Graduate Studies at Stanford Law School, where she teaches courses on complex and transnational litigation, the legal profession, and empirical research methods, and leads the doctoral research colloquium. From 2000-2005 she was the director of the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation, and is currently co-director, with Prof. Paul Brest, of the Law & Public Policy Lab. Prof. Hensler has written extensively on mass claims and class actions and is the lead author of CLASS ACTIONS IN CONTEXT: HOW ECONOMICS, POLITICS AND CULTURE SHAPE COLLECTIVE LITIGATION (2016), and CLASS ACTION DILEMMAS: PURSUING PUBLIC GOALS FOR PRIVATE GAIN (2000), the co-editor of THE GLOBALIZATION OF CLASS ACTIONS (2009), and the founder of Stanford’s Global Class Actions Exchange website, globalclassactions.stanford.edu/ Prof. Hensler has taught classes on comparative class actions and empirical research methods at the University of Melbourne (Australia), Catolica Universidade (Lisboa), University of Hong Kong, and Paris-Dauphine Universite, and held a personal chair in Empirical Legal Studies on Mass Claims at Tilburg University (Netherlands). In 2014, she was awarded an honorary doctorate in law by Leuphana University (Germany). Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, Prof. Hensler was Director of the RAND Institute for Civil Justice (ICJ). She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. Prof. Hensler received her A.B. in political science summa cum laude from Hunter College and her Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.