Justin Henderson

Justin Henderson grew up in Salt Lake City before attending Lewis & Clark College as a Trustee Scholar. He fell in love with campus life and Portland’s iconic food and music culture, while also playing four years on the Pios’ basketball team and two years on the tennis team and spending the Fall 1996 semester in Washington, DC, interning for USA Today’s research polling department.

He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science and Psychology and, with the mentorship of his Lewis & Clark advisors, received a James Madison Memorial Foundation Fellowship, which funded his graduate studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Upon earning his Master of Arts degree in Secondary School Social Studies Education, he returned to Portland to teach at an alternative high school for immigrant and refugee students.

After attending law school at Boston College, Justin spent twenty years as an officer in the U.S. Navy JAG Corps. He deployed to Iraq in 2009, spent three years as an advisor to the commander of Naval Special Warfare’s undersea mission, and earned a Master’s Degree in National Security Studies from the Naval War College, but his primary focus was criminal litigation. He prosecuted and defended several of the Navy’s highest-profile cases, including the successful representation of the USS Fitzgerald’s commanding officer following that ship’s tragic collision with a merchant vessel off the coast of Japan in 2017. A unique highlight of his career was his research and writing that contributed to the July 2024 exoneration of the Port Chicago court-martial defendants, eight decades after 50 African-Americans were convicted in the Navy’s largest-ever mutiny trial.

Justin spent the last five years of his Navy career in Bremerton, Washington, actively involved in Lewis & Clark’s Puget Sound-area alumni groups. He retired from active duty in 2024 and is currently a felony attorney in Tacoma with the Pierce County Department of Assigned Counsel. He is the proud parent of two (probable) future Pioneer scholar-athletes, Bianca and Desmond, who already embody the best of Lewis & Clark’s mission and vision and whose humor, wisdom, and kindness inspire hope in everyone they meet.