Deborah R. Hensler

- Judge John W. Ford Professor of Dispute Resolution
- Room N349, Neukom Building
Expertise
- Alternative Dispute Resolution
- Civil Procedure & Litigation
- Class Actions & Mass Litigation
- Comparative Law
- Complex Litigation
- Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS)
- Law & Society
- Legal Profession
- Mass Torts/Class Actions
- Mediation & Dispute Resolution
- Medical Malpractice
- Policy Analysis
- Product Liability
- Public Policy & Empirical Studies
- Third-Party Litigation Finance
- Transnational Litigation & Arbitration
Biography
Deborah R. Hensler is the Judge John W. Ford Professor of Dispute Resolution at Stanford Law School, where she teaches courses on complex and transnational litigation, arbitration law and policy, the legal profession, and empirical research methods.
Professor Hensler’s empirical research on dispute resolution, complex litigation, class actions, and mass claims has won international recognition. A political scientist and public policy analyst who was the director of the RAND’s Institute for Civil Justice before joining the Stanford Law School faculty, she has testified before state and federal legislatures in the United States on issues ranging from alternative dispute resolution to asbestos litigation and mass torts and consulted with judges and lawyers within and outside of the United States on the design of class action regimes. Professor Hensler is the organizer of the Stanford Globalization of Class Actions Exchange (globalclassactions.stanford.edu), which is spearheading international collaborative research on class actions and group litigation procedures by scholars in Asia, Europe, Latin and North America, and the Middle East. Noted for her decades-long scholarship on asbestos litigation and class actions in the United States, her research and publications have described and interpreted the trajectory of mass claims world-wide. She is the lead author of Class Action Dilemmas: Pursuing Public Goals for Private Gain (RAND, 2000), co-editor of The Globalization of Class Actions (Sage, 2009), and co-editor and lead author of Class Actions in Context: How Culture, Economics and Politics Shape Collective Litigation (Elgar, 2016).
At Stanford, Prof. Hensler teaches seminars on complex litigation, transnational litigation, arbitration law and policy, the legal profession, and research design for empirical legal studies. With Dean Emeritus Paul Brest, she co-founded the law school’s Policy Laboratory and helped shepherd it in its early years. She has taught graduate level courses at Universidade Catolica de Lisboa, Hong Kong University, the University of Melbourne (Australia), Paris Dauphine University and guest lectured at Tilburg University (Netherlands), Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), Nagoya University (Japan), and Universidad Torcuato di Tella (Buenos Aires).
Professor Hensler is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Political and Social Science and was awarded a personal chair in empirical studies of mass claims resolution by Tilburg University (Netherlands). In 2014, she was awarded an honorary doctorate in law by Leuphana University (Germany). She serves on the RAND Institute for Civil Justice Board of Advisors and on the advisory board of the Civil Justice Research Institute, a joint project of the University of California, Irvine, and the University of California Berkeley Law School. In 2018, she served on the Academic Expert Panel for the Litigation Funding Inquiry of the Australian Law Reform Commission.
Education
- BA, City University of New York, 1963
- PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1973
Courses
- Anatomy of the Opioid Litigation: A Case Study in Complex Litigation
- Arbitration: Law, Practice & Politics
- Discussion (1L): The Politics of Procedure
- Elements of Policy Analysis
- Empirical Legal Studies: Research Design
- Externship, Special Circumstances
- Global Litigation
- JSD Research Colloquium
- Policy Practicum: Examining Mandatory Arbitration and NDAs for Gender Discrimination Claims
- Policy Practicum: Suing to Stop Climate Change: Case Studies in International Climate Litigation
- SPILS Masters Thesis
- TGR: Dissertation
Affiliations & Honors
- Member, Board of Overseers, Rand Institute of Civil Justice
- Member (1993-1999), Board of Directors, American Judicature Society
- Member (1997-2001), Board of Directors, American Inns of Court, Leadership Council
- Thorsten Sellin Fellow (2002-Present), American Academy of Political and Social Science
- Recipient, Robert McKay Award for Tort Scholarship, 2002

Policy Practicum: Mediation Confidentiality and Attorney Malpractice in California
Many believe litigation by patent trolls-those in the business of asserting patents rather than making products-is rampant and has harmed innovation and raised consumer prices. This concern has spread to Congress and the U.S. Patent Office, which are considering new regulation of patent trolls. However, there remains insufficient data to determine the amount and impact of patent troll litigation. Students selected for this course will work with renowned patent law scholar Mark Lemley and Law, Science & Technology Teaching Fellow Shawn Miller to produce the first patent litigation database to include comprehensive identification of the type of patent plaintiff involved in each lawsuit. Students’ principal responsibility will be to identify and code patent plaintiffs by type.
view practicumInnovation in Education – Tilburg Law School
News
Clear vs. TSA PreCheck: What’s better for price and privacy?
The Washington Post
This carve out — known by critics as a “forced arbitration clause” — isn’t unique to Clear. But it’s worth a raised eyebrow, said Deborah Hensler, a professor at Stanford Law School who teaches courses on arbitration law. By compelling unhappy or wronged customers to deal with an arbiter rather…
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Leuphana University conferred an honorary Doctorate of Law on Deborah Hensler, July 2014