Taja-Nia Henderson's scholarship focuses on the historical impact of
punishment regimes on property systems in the United States. She is particularly
interested in the legal histories of incarceration (including prisoner
release and reentry) and chattel slavery. In 2016, she was a fellow at
the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.
Professor Henderson received her A.B. from Dartmouth College, and her
J.D., M.A., and Ph.D. from New York University. At NYU School of Law,
she was a dean's scholar, senior notes editor of the N.Y.U. Law Review, and recipient of the Gary E. Moncrieffe graduation award.
After graduating law school, Professor Henderson served as the
Derrick Bell Teaching Fellow in constitutional law at NYU School of Law
and also clerked for the Hon. Consuelo B. Marshall, U.S. District Court,
Central District of California. Before joining the Rutgers faculty in
2010, Professor Henderson was an associate in the litigation group of
Arnold & Porter LLP in New York, where her practice included
commercial litigation and pro bono civil rights advocacy. Her teaching
and research interests are in slavery, incarceration, offender reentry,
law and society, and land use/property.
Professor Henderson's work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in N.Y.U.
Law Review; Stanford Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties;
Lewis and Clark L. Review; Columbia Journal of Race and Law; the Maryland
Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class; and the Law and
History Review. In 2013, she was a fellow at the J. Willard Hurst Summer
Institute in Legal History at the University of Wisconsin.
Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the
DePaul Humanities Center, American Philosophical Society, Filson
Historical Society, and the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of
Congress. Since 2010, Professor Henderson has organized and facilitated
the Rutgers Reentry Roundtable, and she is a member of the steering
committee for Newark Reentry Legal Services (ReLeSe). Professor
Henderson is also a member of the board of directors of Practicing
Attorneys for Law Students Program, Inc. She has been a
visiting scholar at Beijing Jiaotong University (2014), and a visiting professor of law at Brooklyn Law School (2015). In 2013, the
Rutgers Newark Student Bar Association awarded Professor Henderson with
the law school's Professor of the Year award.
