Meet the 2024 ECE Distinguished Alumni Award Recipient
Stephen Henderson, B.S. '95, is the recipient of the 2024 ECE Distinguished Alumni Award from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Davis.
The award celebrates Aggie Engineers who have made a significant impact as leaders, researchers or technological innovators and have brought distinction to themselves and the university. It builds upon Henderson’s 1996 UC Davis laurel, the M.S. Ghausi Medal, the highest honor bestowed upon an outstanding graduating senior from the College of Engineering.
While Henderson is not an engineer today, he has only excelled since receiving his bachelor’s degree. He is the Judge Haskell A. Holloman Professor of Law at the University of Oklahoma, where he is known for his expertise in criminal law and constitutional criminal procedure, his work in law reform, and his efforts to improve and expand legal pedagogy. Within these fields, he often works with how novel technologies impact both the law and greater society.
Emblematic of this focus is his influential “Fourth Amendment time machines” concept. It encapsulates modern technology’s ability — and society’s insatiable drive — to collect, store and process personal data.
“Once the judiciary could appreciate how much criminal investigation had changed, effectively traveling back in time through data mining and even into the future by leveraging human predictability in those same data streams, legal change was inevitable,” Henderson says.
That change came in the landmark 2018 Supreme Court case of Carpenter v. United States, mandating that police officers obtain a warrant before accessing cell site location records.
A Different Calling
Henderson came to UC Davis in the early '90s as a transplant from Los Alamos, New Mexico — home of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where his father worked as a physicist. Encompassed by a physical and social geography of vanguard science and premier scientific minds (take, for example, his older sister serving as the current and first female chair of computer science at Oxford University), Henderson carved out a different identity for himself.
“I come from a family of deep scientific roots, but that wasn’t my calling, at least in any pure form,” Henderson says.
Almost by impulse, he knew from a young age his life had a calling in law. Still, his father encouraged him to study electrical engineering as an undergraduate, a challenge Henderson welcomed. He applied himself to the UC Davis program with unremitting diligence, maintaining a 3.99 grade point average.
“I managed 32 ‘A+’ marks,” Henderson laughingly relates, “but for years, pretty much every interview would begin with, ‘What’s with the single ‘A-’?’ I suppose I’m glad — but it was a course on Shakespeare, for the record — that stage of questioning has passed.”
The ECE program’s focus on critical thinking and theoretical engineering principles — givens, rules and applications — still resonates with Henderson.
“Interestingly, law school is the same thing. You have your givens, which are the facts of a situation. You have your rules, which instead of Maxwell’s equations, are the enacted and judge-made laws. And to get your conclusion, you had better reason correctly. So, I found electrical engineering an extraordinarily good preparatory program.”
Beyond Serendipity
After graduating from UC Davis, Henderson received his Doctor of Jurisprudence from Yale Law School in 1999. His graduation analytic writing was an extended analysis of a cryptographic proposal for secure communications promoted by the NSA and then-President Bill Clinton, investigating whether such technology — including a law enforcement “backdoor” of decryption key escrow — could be trusted.
“I’ve become more skeptical of human nature in the years since,” Henderson says, “but I’ve never stopped being interested in the same questions.”
Indeed, throughout his career, Henderson has been grateful for his grounding in electrical engineering and the ability to apply an engineering perspective to questions of law. Receiving the 2024 ECE Distinguished Alumni Award is a full-circle moment for him.
“It reflects that I’ve worked hard, but then it's fate, it's serendipity... whatever you want to call it. The award is special, somehow encapsulating my career journey — validating that my journey makes sense. I enjoyed my time at Davis, and I still hang out every day with my favorite Aggie [his wife, Hilary]. This award means a great deal to us both.”
To learn more about Henderson, his research and his journey from engineering to law, attend his keynote presentation during the 2025 ECExpo on April 4.