Hon. Thelton E. Henderson
Coalition Member
Judge Thelton E. Henderson, a native of Shreveport, Louisiana, retired from the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California in 2017. He subsequently joined Berkeley Law (formerly known as Boalt Hall), University of California, as a Distinguished Visitor and teaches courses in Civil Procedure and Constitutional Law.
In 2020, the National College Baseball Hall of Fame selected Judge Henderson as the recipient of the George H.W. Bush Distinguished Alumnus Award, honoring his post-college baseball achievements as an accomplished civil rights advocate and federal judge. As an undergraduate at the University of California – Berkeley, he was a two-year letterman in both football and baseball.
After two years at Berkeley Law, he was drafted and served for two years in the Army as a clinical psychology technician at a mental health clinic at Fort Carson, Colorado. After graduating from Berkeley Law in 1962, he became the first African American attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. From 1968 to 1977, he served as an Assistant Dean at Stanford Law School, where he helped diversify the student body and assisted in creating an innovative clinical program. He practiced law in a private firm in San Francisco from 1977 to 1980. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter appointed him to the federal bench, where he served for nearly four decades, and presided as Chief Judge from 1990 to 1997.
In a landmark 1995 civil rights case, Madrid v. Gomez, Judge Henderson found the use of force and level of medical care at Pelican Bay State Prison unconstitutional. During the federal oversight process, he was known to visit the prison personally.
Later, he sat on a special three-judge panel that found California’s overcrowded prisons violated the U.S. Constitution’s 8th Amendment and ordered the state to reduce overcrowding to within 137.5 percent of capacity. In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed this decision in Brown v. Plata.
He was profiled in a documentary film, Soul of Justice: Thelton Henderson’s American Journey (2005) by Abby Ginzburg, and in a biography, Judge Thelton Henderson: Breaking New Grounds (2016) by Richard B. Kuhns.
Among his many awards are the American Bar Association’s Thurgood Marshall Award, the State Bar of California’s Bernard E. Witkin Medal, the Pearlstein Civil Rights Award from the Anti-Defamation League, the Distinguished Service Award from the National Bar Association, the Lewis F. Powell, Jr. Award for Professionalism and Ethics from the American Inns of Court, and the Judge Learned Hand Award from the American Jewish Committee.