Stephen E. Henderson

Professor Henderson’s work broadly engages with the substantive criminal law, the regulation of policing, and our systems of criminal adjudication, including the intersections of those fields with modern technologies—he was, many moons ago, awarded the College of Engineering Medal for most outstanding graduate at the University of California, Davis, and in 2024 he was awarded the Distinguished Alumni Award from their Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. An elected member of the American Law Institute, he has done drafting work for the American Bar Association (Law Enforcement Access to Third Party Records, Reporter) and the Uniform Law Commission (Computer Crime, Co-Reporter); he co-edited The Cambridge Handbook of Surveillance Law; and he has served on various committees working with technologies from fingerprinting and blood spatter, to drone flight, to body cameras, to generative AI.

For over a decade, Professor Henderson wrote a great deal on privacy, evolving technologies, and the misguided Fourth Amendment third party doctrine, including developing a notion of “Fourth Amendment time machines” that was critical in the Supreme Court’s doctrinal pivot in Carpenter v. United States. While he continues that work—for example developing theories of privacy anxiety and neo-general warrants—in the past decade, he has also broadly tackled issues in pedagogy and the criminal law, including how developing technologies ought to influence both.

On the pedagogical front, Professor Henderson is the managing editor of the CrimProf blog, he maintains Crimprof.com where he provides materials including an extensive online resource for teaching criminal law with multimedia, and he has authored first-of-their-kind textbooks that meld traditional Socratic, case-method learning with superior pedagogy, including integrated active learning and spaced repetition: Our Constitutional Constraints: Adjudication, Our Constitutional Constraints: Policing, and The Criminal Law. On the criminal law front, he has developed novel theories such as jury veto, role-reversibility, search and seizure budgets, and trial lottery, and he continues to interrogate what artificial general intelligence—if it comes—ought to mean for our systems of criminal justice.

More generally, Professor Henderson enjoys speaking, teaching, and collaborating; he’ll sometimes publish on topics like vigilantism because they involve folks like Daredevil, Punisher, and Zorro; and he enjoys pondering everything from 80s music to the writing of Robertson Davies to the philosophy of world religions. When he’s not doing any of this, he’s likely spending time with his soulmate, Hilary, and/or their five kids. While their band Sheep Without Rights might be on permanent hiatus, its spirit will always live on.

Education

B.S., Electrical Eng., UC Davis, 1995

J.D., Yale Law School, 1999