In memoriam of Paul Bender

Remembering the life and legacy of Dean Emeritus and Professor of Law Paul Bender, nationally recognized constitutional law expert

The Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University mourns the loss of Paul Bender, dean emeritus and professor of law, who passed away on Sept. 11, 2026 at the age of 93.

Bender served as the fourth dean of the College of Law from 1984-1989, during which time he was instrumental in starting its Indian Legal Program, now considered one of the best in the nation.

“I'd given some thought to whether I wanted to be a dean and decided that most deanships made absolutely no sense,” Bender told the Arizona State University Law Forum in a fall 1984 interview. “In most places it would be simply trying to solve unsolvable problems. If you could survive for a few years, you would think you had been a success. This place seemed different in several ways. I got the sense here that there was an openness to thinking about doing things differently and better. There was a chance here that the normal patterns of legal education could be reevaluated.”

Bender taught courses on U.S. and Arizona constitutional law, and wrote extensively about constitutional law, intellectual property and Indian law, co-authoring the two-volume casebook, Political and Civil Rights in the United States. He was often called upon by national and local media as an expert on the U.S. Supreme Court, having argued more than 20 cases before the Court earlier in his career. and actively participating in constitutional litigation in federal and state courts as well.

Prior to joining ASU Law’s faculty, Bender was a law clerk to U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit Judge Learned Hand and to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. He spent 24 years as a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where his teaching and scholarship focused on constitutional law and individual rights. He served as Principal Deputy Solicitor General of the United States in President Clinton’s administration from 1993-1997. He was responsible for Supreme Court and federal appellate litigation in the areas of civil rights, race and sex discrimination, freedom of speech and religion, and tort claims against the federal government.

Bender was a classmate of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg who President Clinton nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court in 1993. Bender recalled his and Ginsburg’s parallel paths in a New York Post article after she passed away in September 2020.

“It was my favorite argument of all time,” he recalled of the famous case United States v. Virginia, a landmark ruling that opened the doors of the storied Virginia Military Institute, the oldest state-supported military college in the United States, to women. “At the end of the argument, I had a really good feeling.” But he didn’t expect to win the conservative Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s vote, nor did he expect Ginsburg to write the decision. “I’m not sure exactly how that happened,” he told the Post.

Bender also served as a member of the Hopi Tribe’s Court of Appeals, and was a Chief Justice of the Fort McDowell Nation Supreme Court and the San Carlos Apache Court of Appeals.

When his tenure as dean ended, Bender wrote in the spring 1989 ASU Law Forum, “The accomplishment of which I am most proud is the development of extraordinary diversity and excellence in our student body. About 30% of the class that will enter in the fall of 1989 will be comprised of members of minority groups (about three times the percentage of minorities in U.S. law schools generally), and over 40% will be women. This will be a truly national class, with about 40% of the members coming from outside of Arizona.”

Bender was a frequent guest on Arizona PBS’ Arizona Horizon show. Watch segments below with Bender from the show’s 40th anniversary celebration and a July 2021 episode in which he discusses an annual review of the U.S. Supreme Court. He frequently appeared in many local news outlets, as well as national media. Bender is also featured below speaking to the ASU Retirees Association in 2014 on the impact that Arizona legal cases and Supreme Court judges have had on constitutional decisions.

Bender also was featured in several articles covering the outcome of the 2020 general election including this article in the Daily Beast, “GOP Throws More Crap at the Wall as Trump Legal Losses Pile Up.”