TILBURG, Netherlands, November 30, 2011—Tilburg University in the Netherlands has established a chair in Empirical Legal Studies on Mass Claim Resolution to honour Dr. Deborah Hensler, Judge John W. Ford Professor of Dispute Resolution and Associate Dean of Graduate Studies at Stanford Law School. Professor Hensler is internationally renowned for her empirical research on dispute resolution in ordinary and complex litigation, including class actions and mass torts. Her research and writing in recent years has focused on the evolution of mass litigation outside the United States, especially the global spread of class action procedures.

Over the next several years, with colleagues at Tilburg, Professor Hensler will study private and public mass claim resolution systems, with a particular focus on the perspectives of victims. She will also give guest lectures and seminars at Tilburg University during her annual visits.

Professor Hensler has been in the forefront of empirical legal studies in the United States. She was a founder of the RAND Institute for Civil Justice and served as its director for five years before joining the Stanford faculty. At Stanford, she was the director of the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation from 2000-2005. In 2007, Dr. Hensler co-organized the Stanford-Oxford Conference on the Globalization of Class Actions, which subsequently led to the establishment of the Global Class Action Exchange and an ongoing collaborative research project on class actions and group litigation involving scholars from 10 different countries, including Professor Ianika Tzankova of Tilburg University. For the past two years she has been visiting Tilburg on a grant from the Dutch Royal Academy of Science.

The chair of Empirical Legal Studies on Mass Claim Resolution has been established at the department of private law which hosts the Research Institute of TISCO for Studies of Civil Law and Conflict Resolution, as well as at the INTERVICT Institute for Victimology at Tilburg University. Hensler has been appointed since 1 September 2011 for a period of 3 years.

The 5th Annual Conference on the Globalization of Class Actions, co-sponsored by Tilburg University, Stanford Law School and the Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, will be held in The Hague, Dec. 8-9. See the Conference website for more information.