Deborah R. Hensler is the Judge John W. Ford Professor of Dispute Resolution at Stanford Law School, and where she teaches courses on complex and transnational litigation, arbitration, the legal profession, and empirical research methods. She co-founded the Law and Policy Laboratory at the law school with Prof. Paul Brest (emeritus) and helped guide it in its early days. She is a member of the RAND Institute for Civil Justice Board of Advisors and the Berkeley Law Civil Justice Initiative Advisory Board. From 2000-2005 she was the director of the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation and subsequently served as Associate Dean for Graduate Studies from 2006 – 2019.
Prof. Hensler has written extensively on mass claims, class actions, and alternative dispute resolution, and is the lead author and co-editor 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) and the co-editor of The Globalization of Class Actions (2009). Prof. Hensler has taught classes on comparative class actions and empirical research methods at the University of Melbourne (Australia), Catolica Universidade (Lisboa), Paris Dauphine Universitéee, and the University of Hong Kong, and held a personal chair in Empirical Legal Studies on Mass Claims at Tilburg University (Netherlands) from 2011-2017. 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 member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. Professor. 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.