Summary
U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson of the Northern District of California, an icon of the civil rights movement and champion of prison and police reform from the bench, plans to retire in August.
Henderson, 83, confirmed the move, which was first reported by Reuters, in a phone interview Monday.
“I’m starting to feel the grind and I think that I probably will serve the court best if I don’t play a season too long like Kobe Bryant just did,” said Henderson, referencing the recently retired Los Angeles Lakers superstar.
…
After time in private practice back in the Bay Area and at the Legal Aid Society in East Palo Alto, Henderson took a position with Stanford University in 1968 working to recruit minority students to the law school, which had only one black graduate at the time. Stanford Professor Emeritus Barbara Babcock said that Henderson was the right person for the job because “he really knew what it took to be one of very few minority people in a privileged white atmosphere and he knew who could do it.” At a time when some members of Stanford’s faculty were skeptical of Henderson’s mission, Babcock said that he possessed a unique ability to “persuade people that we’re all on the same page.”
Henderson, who worked at Stanford for eight years before returning to private practice, said that lessons he learned there affected his approach on the bench.
“I learned the importance of institutionalizing” change, Henderson said. “I worried—and in fact knew—that if I left after a couple of years that the program would fail,” he said.
“The goal is not just to make temporary changes, but make changes that are going to last long after I’m gone,” he said.
Read More