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 of Law 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. She served as Interim Dean of Boyd from 2012-2013.
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 is also a board member
of the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement (the
Mob Museum).
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 5th in the country in one of her ballroom
categories.
Professor Rapoport had taught Enron, Corporate Scandal,
Ethics and Bankruptcy.