PracticePerfect Professional Responsibility

Nancy B. Rapoport is the Garman Turner Gordon Professor of Law at the William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and an Affiliate Professor of Business Law and Ethics in the Lee Business School at UNLV. After receiving her B.A., summa cum laude, from Rice University in 1982 and her J.D. from Stanford Law School in 1985, she clerked for the Honorable Joseph T. Sneed III on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and then practiced law (primarily bankruptcy law) with Morrison & Foerster in San Francisco from 1986-1991.

She started her academic career at The Ohio State University College of Law in 1991, moving from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor with tenure in 1995 to Associate Dean for Student Affairs (1996) and Professor (1998). She left Ohio State to become Dean and Professor of Law at the University of Nebraska College of Law, where she served as Dean from 1998-2000. She then served as Dean and Professor of Law at the University of Houston Law Center from July 2000-May 2006 and as Professor of Law from June 2006-June 2007, before joining the faculty at Boyd. She served as Interim Dean of Boyd from 2012-2013, as Senior Advisor to the President of UNLV from 2014-2015, as Acting Executive Vice President & Provost from 2015-2016, as Acting Senior Vice President for Finance and Business (for July and August 2017), and as Special Counsel to the President from May 2016-June 2018.

Her specialties are bankruptcy ethics, ethics in governance, law firm behavior, and the depiction of lawyers in popular culture. Among her published works are Corporate Scandals and Their Implications 3rd Edition (Nancy B. Rapoport and Jeffrey D. Van Niel, eds., West Academic 2018), which addresses why we never seem to learn from corporate scandals, Law School Survival Manual: From LSAT to Bar Exam, co-authored with Jeffrey D. Van Niel (Aspen Publishing 2010), and Law Firm Job Survival Manual: From First Interview to Partnership, also co-authored with Jeffrey D. Van Niel (Aspen Publishing 2014).

She is admitted to the bars of California, Ohio, Nebraska, Texas, Nevada, and the United States Supreme Court. In 2001, she was elected to the American Law Institute, and in 2002, she received a Distinguished Alumna Award from Rice University. In 2017, she was inducted into Phi Kappa Phi (Chapter 100). She is the Secretary of the Board of Directors of the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement (the Mob Museum) and a Trustee of Claremont Graduate University. She is also a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and a Fellow of the American College of Bankruptcy.

In 2009, the Association of Media and Entertainment Counsel presented her with the Public Service Counsel Award at the 4th Annual Counsel of the Year Awards. In 2017, she received the Commercial Law League of America’s Lawrence P. King Award for Excellence in Bankruptcy, and in 2018, she was one of the recipients of the NAACP Legacy Builder Awards (Las Vegas Branch #1111). She has served as the fee examiner or chair of the fee review committee in large bankruptcy cases such as Zetta Jet, Toys R Us, Caesars, Station Casinos, Pilgrim’s Pride, and Mirant.

She also appeared in the Academy Award®-nominated movie Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Magnolia Pictures 2005) as herself. Despite being listed in IMDb, she has not yet been able to join the Screen Actors Guild. In her spare time, she competes pro-am in American Rhythm and American Smooth ballroom dancing. In 2014, she won the national U.S. Open ProAm Rising Star American Smooth Competition B Division, and in 2017, she came in 2nd in the “C” Open to the World ProAm American Style 9-Dance Championship. The most interesting thing about her is that she is married to a former Marine Scout-Sniper. The best way to reach her is by calling her on her cell phone.