William D. Henderson
Professor of Law, Indiana University Maurer School of Law
Val Nolan Faculty Fellow, Indiana University Maurer School of Law
Director, Center on the Global Legal Profession, Indiana University Maurer School of Law
Professor Bill Henderson joined the Indiana Law faculty in 2003 following a visiting appointment at Chicago-Kent College of Law and a judicial clerkship for Judge Richard Cudahy of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. He teaches various business law courses, including Corporations, Business Planning, and a class on law firms as business organization. In conjunction with other Indiana law faculty, Bill is developing The Legal Profession, a new course that explores how different practice settings (e.g., corporate practice versus criminal defense versus government lawyers) influence the moral and ethical duties of lawyers.
Bill’s scholarship focuses on empirical analysis of the legal profession and legal education. His published work includes articles in the North Carolina Law Review, the Indiana Law Journal, the Texas Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, and the Stanford Law Review. In the law firm context, he is currently examining a wide variety of market trends, including patterns of lawyer mobility, the relationship between profitability and associate satisfaction, the economic geography of large law firms, and attrition rates of female and minority attorneys. His recent legal-education work explores the relationship between labor markets and the annual U.S. News & World Report law school rankings. Prior education-related projects include an innovative study which found evidence that the predictive validity of the LSAT may be partially attributable to the legal academy's heavy and under-theorized use of time-pressured exams. In addition, his 2002 analysis of the Cleveland Public Schools was the first study to utilize GIS maps for visually depicting the relationship between a school district's socioeconomic composition and students' performance on state proficiency exams.
Bill received his J.D. with honors from the University of Chicago, where he was comment editor of the University of Chicago Law Review. He also earned a B.A. magna cum laude from Case Western University. Henderson was awarded the Leon H. Wallace Teaching Award – Indiana University Law School's top teaching prize – in 2006. In addition to his teaching responsibilities, Bill is a research associate with the Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE) and director of the Law Firms Working Group, a joint initiative of the Indiana Law and the American Bar Foundation. He is also a regular contributor to the Empirical Legal Studies Blog (www.elsblog.org).
