Henderson Stepping Into the Lounge

It's my pleasure to announce that Professor Taja-Nia Y. Henderson of Rutgers School of Law, Newark, is stepping into the faculty lounge to sit with us for a spell.  

Cribbing now from the her Rutgers website, I'll add that: Professor Henderson received her A.B. from Dartmouth College, her M.A. from New York University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and her J.D. from New York University School of Law, where she was a Dean’s Scholar and senior notes editor of the N.Y.U. Law Review.  Before joining the Rutgers faculty in 2010, Professor Henderson clerked for the Hon. Consuelo B. Marshall, U.S. District Court, Central District of California, was an associate in the litigation practice group of Arnold & Porter LLP in New York, and served as the Derrick Bell Teaching Fellow in constitutional law at NYU School of Law.  Her publications include “New Frontiers in Fair Lending: Confronting Lending Discrimination Against Ex-Offenders,” 80 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1237 (October 2005) and “Racial Fortuity, Rights Sacrifice, and the Promise of Convergence in Prison and Policing Policy,” forthcoming in the Columubia Journal of Race & Law.

Professor Henderson's teaching and research interests are in slavery, social control organizations, incarceration and prisoner reentry, law and society, and land use/property.  I will also add — and this is where our interests really overlap — that Professor Henderson is writing a doctoral dissertation on the 19th century emergence of Virginia’s state prison – the first penitentiary in the slaveholding American south – and its relationship to the institution of racial slavery in the state.  I'm really looking forward to her posts — and hope to hear a lot about the latest on institutions in Virginia in the pre-Civil War era.