In the mid-1970s, most legal scholars employed traditionally lawyerly approaches when analyzing the legal system’s role in society. They pondered theoretical frameworks. They looked at precedent. Legal reasoning and case studies ruled the day.  But using real-world data to reveal gaps between legal theory and practical outcomes? That was rare.

One exception was a rising-star researcher at the Santa Monica-based think tank RAND Corporation. Deborah Hensler was thinking about civil justice issues like the social scientist she was. Armed with a political science Ph.D. from MIT and fueled by statistical tools and complex data sets, Hensler would go on to establish and run RAND’s Institute for Civil Justice—a key driver of the empirical legal research movement and a close cousin to SLS’s Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession, with both entities focused on improving civil justice through real world research.

Over her decades at RAND, Hensler gained an international reputation for rigorous, nonpartisan inquiries into the public policy implications of mass tort litigation, alternative dispute resolution, class actions, personal injury claims, and other expansive swaths of the civil justice system. She joined the SLS faculty in 1998 as the Judge John W. Ford Professor of Dispute Resolution.

On Friday, September 20, a full-day conference in honor of Deborah Hensler brought together approximately 50 of Hensler’s biggest fans and friends: professors, scholars, judges, practicing lawyers, and current and former colleagues and students from across the country and around the world. Hensler sat front and center as panelists engaged in a series of discussions on the civil litigation issues that have inspired her research and teaching for more than half a century. The substantive sessions were peppered throughout the day with praise for Hensler and fond memories, including a recounting of favorite “Hensler-ims,” which often involved stories of Hensler pointedly nudging other legal scholars to think more empirically.

Papers written in connection with the conference will be published in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of Tort Law.

At the conference dinner, Hensler reflected on her years at SLS: “When (former SLS dean) Paul Brest called to offer me a chair in dispute resolution, I thought I would spend a few years here—a nice way, I thought, to cap my career,” Hensler said. “I wasn’t yet 60, but in those days, people still thought that 65 was retirement age. I learned later that a fair number of our colleagues wondered at the time what or how someone without a law degree would teach law students—although they had Mitch Polinsky as an excellent example of how to do that. Somehow the half-dozen years I thought I would teach have stretched into more than 25—not just the brief cap on my career that I had originally envisioned, but an entire second career.”

A second career that shows little sign of slowing: “Like a good empiricist, I want to share some facts,” Hensler said. “This is not a retirement party.”

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Nora Freeman Engstrom, Ernest W. McFarland Professor of Law and co-director of the Rhode Center on the Legal Profession, organized the conference to honor her friend and longtime colleague. In her remarks opening the conference, Engstrom praised Hensler’s deep investment in other researchers’ scholarship—and lauded Hensler for pushing her students and peers to “be better, more careful, more nuanced, to take the long way around.”

“I got to know Deborah when I joined the faculty in 2009 and I remember so vividly the help she gave me on the first article I wrote as a professor, Sunlight in Settlement Mills,” Engstrom said. “She was so patient in taking the time to convince me that I needed to be a bit more precise here, a bit more rigorous there. And I recall thinking, ‘I guess it’s just because we’re colleagues and we’re writing about the same kind of issues. Maybe it makes sense that she’s that invested in my work.’ But over the past 13 years, our offices have been across from one another, and I now see that she was that invested in my work because she’s that invested in all young scholars’ work. And her high standards are an incredible gift to give the next generation.”

Professors Norman Spaulding, Amalia Kessler, David Freeman Engstrom, and Diego Zambrano also helped conceive and organize the conference and the panels, along with Rhode Center Fellow Ayelet Sela and its Executive Director Lucy Ricca. SLS Professors Shirin Sinnar and Robert MacCoun also served as panelists.

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One of Hensler’s former research assistants, Donna Shestowsky, JD ’03 (PhD. ’03), senior associate dean for academic affairs and Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at the UC Davis School of Law, served on the Empirical Legal Studies panel. “My experiences with Deborah led me to epiphanies about the value of testing assumptions about law and policy,” said Shestowsky, who continues some of the research Hensler started decades ago, including analyzing the types of dispute resolution procedures litigants prefer, and why. “The idea that you could make good decisions as a lawyer by looking at data, not just by studying cases—that was really transformative.” 

Shestowsky spoke about Hensler’s influential 2002 Journal of Dispute Resolution paper—with the “very classic Deborah title”: Suppose It’s Not True: Challenging Mediation Ideology. In the oft-cited study, Hensler used statistical evidence to question the commonly held assumption that disputants favored mediation to trials. 

A panel on International Comparative Civil Procedure paid tribute to Hensler’s focus on transnational research and the comparative study of legal systems. The conversation was also a nod to her prior service as SLS’s associate dean for graduate studies and program director for the JSD program, during which time she significantly expanded opportunities for international students to come to SLS to pursue the research-based law degree similar to a Ph.D. Panel chair Amalia Kessler, Lewis Talbot and Nadine Hearn Shelton Professor of International Legal Studies, praised Hensler’s “transformative work in building the JSD program.”

Manuel Gomez, JSM ’02/JSD ’07, associate professor of law at Florida International University, was one of Hensler’s first Stanford Program in International Legal Studies (SPILS) advisees and JSD students. He called Hensler his “academic mom.” 

“If you wanted to continue having a conversation with Deborah as a student, you had to embrace  the terminology of empirical research, internalize its value, and then apply it to any research you were doing,” Gomez said.

A panel on Complex Litigation, Class Actions and Mass Claims included Elizabeth Cabraser, widely recognized as one of the country’s leading plaintiffs lawyers and one of the many practitioners Hensler interviewed when writing her highly regarded book, Class Action Dilemmas: Pursuing Public Goals for Private Gain. 

“I’ve been a plaintiffs’ lawyer my whole career, and you know us. We are not an introspective lot,” Cabraser said, eliciting laughter from the room full of academics. “To be confronted by Deborah Hensler, who, by the way, is a cross-examiner par excellence, asking, ‘What are you doing and why are you doing it? What do you hope to accomplish?’ To be confronted with those questions, while in the trenches, trying to prosecute a complex case, was life altering. I had to stop and think about what I was doing. Why was I doing it? For whom or what was I doing it? I thought I knew…but why? And is there a way to do it better?”

Yale Law School Professor Judith Resnik, who has been Hensler’s friend and collaborator since Hensler’s early days at RAND, spoke on a panel chaired by David Freeman Engstrom titled What Deborah Has Taught Us About Litigation, Law, and Life. “Whenever I edit a student paper, and when I write my own, if I find the word ‘only,’ I think of Deborah—and I take it out,” Resnik said. “To say ‘only’ requires a baseline. You need to know the set, and you need to know the distribution to know whether 1, 100, or 1 million is an ‘only’ or not. It is Deborah’s commitment to stories, statistics, individuals, and aspirations for law that constantly teach me not only how to think about things, but when I write, to be careful about what I say.” 

Other tributes to Hensler throughout the day called out her kindness, political advocacy, and loyalty to her friends.

“I was close to tears at several points when younger colleagues talked about how I had affected their careers and lives,” Hensler said after the event. “Even when one tries to be sensitive to how advice, particularly critical advice, will affect others, it isn’t clear what difference, if any, it makes. The whole experience of the conference was gratifying, but also humbling.”