Nachruf

Tribute to Dan Fenno Henderson, 1921-2000

Dan Fenno Henderson, Emeritus Professor of Law of the University of Washington, died on March 14, 2001, having suffered a crippling stoke three months earlier. Henderson was an internationally renowned comparative law scholar. He authored three seminal works on Japanese legal history as well as dozens of articles and essays on Japanese law - past and present. He was co-editor with the late former Chief Justice Takaaki Hattori of the first English language monograph on Japanese civil procedure and editor of the first comprehensive study of Japan's postwar constitution. He was also the first to teach a regularly offered course on Japanese law outside of Japan and the founding director of the University of Washington's Asian Law Program. He will be perhaps best remembered by readers in America, however, for his contributions to the Japanese American Society for Legal Studies as the second editor of ‘Law in Japan: An Annual’, and for nearly two decades as Representative Director of the Society. Few, if any, American legal scholars have individually achieved so much for a single area of comparative and foreign law.

A native of Washington State, Henderson began his lifetime involvement with Japan in a U.S. army Japanese language training program at the University of Michigan during World War II. After a brief tour of duty in Japan during the Allied Occupation, Henderson returned to civilian life in the United States and began to study law. He graduated from the Harvard Law School in 1949 and began briefly to practice law in Seattle. He decided to continue his scholarly interests in Japan and entered the Political Science Department at the University of California, Berkeley, as a Ph.D. candidate. After completing his dissertation, later published as a two volume study of conciliation under Tokugawa and Modern Japanese law, and receiving his doctorate, he returned to Tokyo and to legal practice. Among the last American lawyers to be admitted to the Japanese bar in the mid 1950s, Henderson became the resident partner of Graham & James in Tokyo. He left Tokyo in 1962 to join the faculty of the University of Washington School of Law and become the first director of a newly created Ford Foundation-funded research and instructional program on East Asian law. Within five years Henderson had not only developed and begun to teach the first regularly offered course on Japanese law to be taught outside of Japan, but he had also successfully organized the first and still only comparative law center in the United States to integrate international and American faculty, researchers and students in a comprehensive research and instructional effort focused on the comparative study of two national legal systems. By 1969 he had realized his vision of a comparative law curriculum designed to prepare bilingual American and East Asian lawyers for professional careers facilitating trans-Pacific trade and investment. As the program expanded during three decades as director, Henderson supervised the development of courses and teaching materials for comparative U.S./Japanese law courses in contracts, transnational litigation, tax and corporate relations in addition to courses and related teaching materials for Japanese public law, criminal law and antitrust law. Under his direction courses in traditional and contemporary Chinese law as well as the first regularly offered course on Korean law to be taught in the United States were initiated. Henderson was assisted in the first years of the Program by a remarkably talented group of young Japanese lawyers and legal scholars who were to become leaders in their respective fields. He also depended upon the cooperation of his American colleagues at the University of Washington. Nevertheless, the vision for the Program and its professional aims was his, and by the early 1970s he could claim the credit for having created a leading international comparative law center. The Asian Law Center today provides instructional and research opportunities for bilingual students from five continents in the University of Washington J.D. and LL.M. and Ph.D. in Asian Law degree programs. Each year the Center also hosts dozens of scholars as well as a selected group of judges and prosecutors from East Asia who participate in its programs.

A dedicated teacher, upon retirement in 1991 Henderson continued to teach first as a visiting professor at Washington University in St. Louis and subsequently as a regular member of the faculty at the Hastings College of Law in San Francisco. In the course of his career Henderson trained three generations of comparative lawyers and legal scholars on both sides of the Pacific. His former students today include nearly a third of all American scholars teaching in the field of East Asian law - including nearly all of the North American Japanese law specialists teaching west of the Mississippi River - as well as hundreds of lawyers and legal scholars in practice or in teaching throughout the Asia Pacific region.

John O. Haley