Bio :

Prof. Nancy B. Rapoport is a University of Nevada, Las Vegas Distinguished Professor, 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. Her specialties are bankruptcy ethics, ethics in governance, law firm behavior, and the depiction of lawyers in popular culture. Previously, she clerked for Hon. Joseph T. Sneed III on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit following law school, then practiced primarily bankruptcy law with Morrison & Foerster in San Francisco from 1986-91. Prof. Rapoport 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 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 2012-13, as senior advisor to the president of UNLV from 2014-15, as acting executive vice president and provost from 2015-16, 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. Prof. Rapoport is admitted to the bars of the states of California, Ohio, Nebraska, Texas and Nevada and of the U.S. 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. In 2017, she was inducted into Phi Kappa Phi (Chapter 100). She is a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and 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 as chair of the fee review committee in such large bankruptcy cases as Zetta Jet, Toys ’R Us, Caesars, Station Casinos, Pilgrim’s Pride and Mirant. Prof. Rapoport appeared in the Academy Award®-nominated movie Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Magnolia Pictures 2005) as herself. She received her B.A. summa cum laude from Rice University in 1982 and her J.D. from Stanford Law School in 1985.