Deborah L. Rhode is an Americanjurist. She is the Ernest W. McFarland Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, the director of the Stanford Center on the Legal Profession, and the director of Stanford's Program in Law and Social Entrepreneurship. She coined the term The "No-Problem" Problem, and has authored over 250 articles and over 20 books, including Women and Leadership, Lawyers as Leaders, and The Beauty Bias, and is the nation's most frequently cited scholar in legal ethics.
Rhode joined the Stanford Law School faculty in 1979 and was the second woman on the faculty. At Stanford, Rhode taught the law school's first class on gender and the law, and also first to teach a course in leadership. Rhode is a former president of the Association of American Law Schools, the former founding president of the International Association of Legal Ethics, the former chair of the American Bar Association's Commission on Women in the Profession, the founder and former director of Stanford's Center on Ethics, and the former director of the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. During the Clinton administration, Rhode served as senior investigative counsel to the minority members of the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary and advised them on presidential impeachment issues. Currently, Rhode is the vice chair of the Board of Directors of Legal Momentum and is a columnist for The National Law Journal. She is a former member of the Yale Corporation, the governing body of Yale University. Rhode has received the American Bar Association's Outstanding Scholar Award; the American Bar Association's Michael Franck Professional Responsibility Award; the American Bar Foundation's W. M. Keck Foundation Award for distinguished scholarship on legal ethics; the American Bar Association's Pro Bono Publico Award; and the White House's Champion of Change Award for her work on access to justice. Rhode is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is also the most-cited legal scholar in legal ethics, as found by both a 2007 and a 2015 study, and is the third most-cited female legal scholar overall. A 2012 study identified Rhode as one of the 50 most relevant law professors in the nation.
Personal life
Deborah Rhode was born in the early 1950s in Evanston, Illinois, and grew up in an affluent suburb of Chicago. Rhode is married to Ralph Cavanagh, a senior attorney and co-director of Natural Resources Defense Council's energy program.
