Adjunct Professor of Law
Professor of Law at the William S. Boyd School of Law, University
of Nevada
J.D., Stanford Law School
B.A., summa cum laude, Rice University
Nancy B. Rapoport is the Gordon Silver Professor and Interim
Dean at the William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada,
Las Vegas. 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 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, and she moved from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor
with tenure in 1995 to Associate Dean for Student Affairs (1996)
and Professor (1998) (just as she left Ohio State to become Dean
and Professor of Law at the University of Nebraska College of
Law). She served as Dean of the University of Nebraska College
of Law 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, when she
left to join the faculty at Boyd.
Her specialties are bankruptcy ethics, ethics in governance, and
the depiction of lawyers in popular culture. Among her
published works are Enron and Other Corporate Fiascos: The
Corporate Scandal Reader 2d (Nancy B. Rapoport, Jeffrey D. Van Niel
& Bala G. Dharan, eds.), which addresses the question of why we
never seem to learn from prior corporate scandals, and Law School
Survival Manual: From LSAT to Bar Exam, co-authored with Jeffrey D.
Van Niel (Aspen Publishers 2010). She is admitted to the bars
of the states of California, Ohio, Nebraska, Texas, and Nevada and
of the United States Supreme Court. In 2001, she was elected
to membership in the American Law Institute, and in 2002, she
received a Distinguished Alumna Award from Rice
University. She is a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and
a Fellow of the American College of Bankruptcy. She currently
serves as the Dean of Faculty of the American Board of
Certification, the entity that develops, grades, and certifies
lawyers for specialties in business bankruptcy, consumer
bankruptcy, and creditors’ rights. 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. She now co-chairs AMEC’s Law School
Committee.
She has also appeared in the Academy Award®-nominated
movie, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Magnolia
Pictures 2005) (as herself). Although the movie garnered her a
listing in www.imdb.com, she
still hasn’t been able to join the Screen Actors Guild. In her
spare time, she competes, pro-am, in American Rhythm and American
Smooth ballroom dancing with her teacher, Sergei
Shapoval. Currently, she is ranked 4th in the
country in two of her ballroom categories.
Professor Rapoport had taught Enron, Corporate Scandal,
Ethics and Bankruptcy.