Legal empiricists use a variety of methods to uncover the facts about the consequences of legal policies. Prof. Hensler will describe her prior research on court-connected ADR systems and class actions in the U.S. and compare and contrast how scholars and policy makers responded to these studies. She will close by describing her recently completed international collaboration on comparative class action research and offer some reflections on the value of collaborative efforts.

About the speaker:

Deborah R. Hensler’s empirical research on dispute resolution, complex litigation, class actions and mass tort liability 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 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, 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 in the United States, her research and publications have described and interpreted the trajectory of mass claims world-wide.

At Stanford Prof. Hensler teaches seminars on complex litigation, transnational litigation, the legal profession, and research design for empirical legal studies and serves as associate dean of graduate studies. She has also collaborated with Dean Emeritus Paul Brest on the development of the law schools’ Law & Public Policy Laboratory.

Professor Hensler is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Political and Social Science and has been 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).