Bill Henderson Joins Legal Profession Blog

Posted by Jeff Lipshaw

Mike, Alan and I are thrilled to announce that Bill Henderson is joining us as a co-editor.  Not only is Bill one of legal academia’s pre-eminent empiricists (in which capacity he is better known to the blogosphere as one of the editors of Empirical Law Studies Blog), but he is, at least in my mind, the leading empirical scholar on legal profession issues.  Combined with Mike’s powerhouse reporting on disciplinary and professional responsibility issues (as recognized by the ABA Journal and the Wall Street Journal blogs) and Alan’s expertise in comparative legal systems and ethics, this really becomes the clearinghouse for issues in the legal profession. 

Study of legal education and the profession is fraught with the possibility (and the reality) of social, political, and cultural predispositions.  Whether social science can ever be objective in the manner of the physical sciences is a fascinating issue (but for another time and place), but Bill brings to the party a wonderful combination of empirical technique and open-mindedness.  Bill looks rigorously at 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. He has explored the relationship between labor markets and the annual U.S. News & World Report law school rankings.

I’ve had a chance to work with Bill just a little in connection with his Law Firms Working Group, a joint initiative of the Indiana Law and the American Bar Foundation.  In conjunction with other Indiana law faculty, Bill is developingThe Legal Profession, a new course which explores how differentpractice settings (e.g., corporate practice versus criminal defenseversus government lawyers) influence the moral and ethical duties oflawyers.  Bill is also a research associate with the Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE).

Bill has been a member of the IU-Bloomington Law faculty since 2003.  He received his B.A. from Case Western Reserve in 1997, and his J.D. from the University of Chicago (where he was the Comment Editor of the Law Review) in 2001.  More importantly, anybody who has met Bill knows he is one of the genuinely good people in this business.

Please join us in welcoming Bill and in awaiting some great stuff!