Deborah Rhode, Who Transformed the Field of Legal Ethics, Dies at 68
A Stanford professor, she pushed the legal profession to confront the ways it failed clients and to be more inclusive of women.
Deborah Rhode in 1993. She spent over four decades teaching at Stanford and was by far the most-cited scholar in legal ethics.Credit.Chuck Painter/Stanford News Service
Published Jan. 18, 2021Updated Jan. 25, 2021
Deborah L. Rhode, a law professor who transformed the field of legal ethics from little more than a crib sheet for passing the bar exam into an empirically rich, morally rigorous investigation into how lawyers should serve the public, died on Jan. 8 at her home in Stanford, Calif. She was 68.
The legal academy lost one of its finest scholars and teachers when Professor Deborah Rhode of Stanford Law School died on January 8, 2020, at the age of 68. She was only the second woman to join the faculty there, a position she held for 41 years.
Professor Rhode was one of the nation’s leaders in the law of sex discrimination, as well as in legal ethics and the legal profession. It would be hard to think of a gender law scholar whose work was both so widely cited and so broad in scope. Among the many subjects she tackled were bias in the legal profession, the history of the legal profession, glass ceiling issues, structural and unconscious bias, sexual harassment, pregnancy discrimination, women in leadership, bias in courtrooms, gender discrimination in education, and appearance discrimination. And in recent years, she had grappled with broader questions about people and society in which we live, writing books about leadership, adultery, character, cheating, and ambition.