Rhode, Deborah Lynn,
1952-2021, American legal ethicist and educator, b.
Evanston, IL, Yale (BA, 1974), Yale Law (JD, 1977). Raised in the Chicago
suburbs, Rhode was a champion debater in high school before joining the
second coed class at Yale in 1970, where she was the first woman to head the
Yale Debate Association. She joined the Stanford University law faculty in
1979, only the third woman ever to be hired by the department, where she was
the founding director of the Stanford Center of Legal Ethics, and a director
of Stanford’s Institute of Research on Women and Gender and its
Program on Social Entrepreneurship; the school’s Deborah L. Rhode
Public Interest Award was established in 2003 in her honor. She served as an
expert on legal ethics and gender for the House Judiciary Committee during
the Clinton impeachment hearings in 1998. The author of 30 books and over
200 scholarly and popular articles, she is best remembered for her writings
on feminism and the law. She was also the coauthor with Nora Engstrom, Scott
Cummings, and David Urban of the textbook Legal Ethics (8th
edition, 2020). She was awarded the White House’s Champion of Change
award (2011) for a lifetime’s work in increasing access to justice.
Inspired by her affection for her cocker spaniel, she had completed a
manuscript at the time of her death titled What Dogs
Deserve to be published in 2021.
See her Justice and Gender: Sex Discrimination and the Law
(1989), Speaking of Sex: The Denial of Gender
Inequality (1997), The Beauty Bias: The Injustice of
Appearance in Life and Law (2010).
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