55th Faculty Senate Chair and Vice Chair

The members of Stanford’s 55th Senate have elected Kenneth A. Schultz, Professor of Political Science, as its Chair for the Senate’s 2022-23 year, and Deborah R. Hensler, Judge John W. Ford Professor of Dispute Resolution at Stanford Law School, as the Senate’s Vice Chair. Their one-year term of office begins Fall Quarter of 2022. 

Chair, Kenneth Schultz    

Kenneth A. Schultz is professor of political science and director of the Program in International Relations. His research primarily focuses on international conflict and conflict resolution, including the effects of democratic institutions on interstate bargaining, the influence of partisanship and polarization on foreign policy, and the onset and resolution of disputes over territory and borders. His current project seeks to understand why conflicts over territory became less frequent after World War II, and whether events like the Russian invasion of Ukraine portend a reversal of this trend. He is the author of Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy and co-author of World Politics: Interests, Interactions, and Institutions, a leading undergraduate textbook. He was the recipient the Karl Deutsch Award, given by the International Studies Association, and a Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, awarded by Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences.

Vice Chair, Deborah R. Hensler  

Deborah R. Hensler is the Judge John W. Ford Professor of Dispute Resolution and Associate Dean for Graduate Studies Emerita at Stanford Law School, where she teaches courses on complex and transnational litigation, the legal profession, and empirical research methods. She co-founded the Law and Policy Laboratory at the law school with Prof. Paul Brest (emeritus). She is a member of the RAND Institute Civil Justice Board of Overseers and the Berkeley Law Civil Justice Initiative Advisory Board. From 2000-2005 she was the director of the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation.

Prof. Hensler has written extensively on mass claims and class actions and is the lead author 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), and Catolica Universidade (Lisboa) and Paris Dauphine Universitee,  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. Prof. 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.