Deborah Rhode is the Ernest W. McFarland Professor of Law and the Director of the Center on the Legal Profession at Stanford University. Her teaching and research focuses on gender inequality and legal ethics. She is the former president of the Association of American Law Schools, the former chair of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Women in the Profession, the former founding director of Stanford’s Center on Ethics, a former trustee of Yale University, and the former director of Stanford’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender. She also served as senior counsel to the Minority members of the Judiciary Committee, the United States House of Representatives, on presidential impeachment issues during the Clinton administration. She is the most frequently cited scholar on legal ethics and writes for general as well as scholarly audiences in leading academic journals and in newspapers and magazines including The New York Times and Ms. She is a regular columnist for the National Law Journal.

Professor Rhode graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from Yale College and received her legal training from Yale Law School. After clerking for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, she joined the Stanford faculty. She is the author or coauthor of twenty books and over 200 articles.

Her recent books concerning gender include Women and Leadership: The State of Play and Strategies for Change (with Barbara Kellerman, 2007); Gender and Law: Theory, Doctrine, Commentary (with Katharine T. Bartlett, 2006); The Difference “Difference” Makes: Women and Leadership (2003), and Speaking of Sex (1997). Her book on appearance discrimination, The Injustice of Appearance, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.