First Female Dean in Law Center History (Dean Nancy B. Rapoport 2000 – 2006)

While serving as dean and professor of law at the University of Nebraska College of Law, Nancy B. Rapoport was presented with the opportunity to hold the same position at the University of Houston Law Center in 2000. The opportunity to return to her hometown was enough for her to relocate from Lincoln, Neb.

“I really had two things in mind,” Rapoport said. “One – I knew it was a great school. But two – it's my hometown. I was able to be back with my family again. Getting to go home to Texas was a no-brainer. I'm really glad I made the switch.”

Rapoport’s hiring as the seventh permanent dean in the school’s history marked the first time a woman had served in the role.

“When I realized I was going to be the first woman law dean at the Law Center, it didn't change how I was going to react to things,” Rapoport said. “But I think it did change the idea for other people of how a dean should behave. There are a lot of different ways good deans behave. Up until me, they'd only seen how male deans behave. I gave them a glimpse into some other things that I might have been doing because I was a woman, or because I was a native Texan, or because of my own personality. But it expanded people's idea on what a dean could be.

“More than anything else though, for our students, they need to be able to see themselves in roles that they might want to try on later. It’s important for students to visualize themselves as law firm partners, as people in the government, as administrators in universities or law schools, so that they can expand their notions of what's available to them.”

Rapoport said what stood out most to her about the Law Center was the size of its student body compared to her previous institution. One of her first decisions as dean was to remove receptacles from a bygone era from some of the classrooms.

“Nebraska was a much smaller school than the Law Center was,” she said. “I had to get used to the sheer size, number of students and number of faculty. The thing that struck me most was there were ashtrays in the classroom. One of the first things that I did when I bargained with the provost as I was accepting the job was he needed to do a re-design of those classrooms.”

Early in Rapoport’s deanship was Tropical Storm Allison in 2001 – a flooding event that proved to be devastating for the Law Center and its facility.

“Tropical Storm Allison dumped 14 feet of water into our buildings,” Rapoport said. “We were completely out of a home all summer. We ended up in the basketball arena. I think Career Services was in the concession stand back then. But we had a small cohort of people who were willing to pull together and re-design the law school.

“We learned not to put rare books two stories below ground when you're at a city with Houston's sea level. We learned we don't want to put the most important stuff, like your servers, when you live at sea level. I have a vague memory that someone told me the first book to float up after Tropical Storm Allison was ‘Law of the Sea,’ which of course is ironic.”

With the memories of Tropical Storm Allison lingering, Rapoport and other members of the Law Center’s administration and faculty lent a helping hand to the Loyola University New Orleans College of Law when it was mired in the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

“The credit goes to Associate Dean Sondra Tennessee and Professor Seth Chandler,” Rapoport said. “Loyola’s New Orleans College of Law became our roommates. We found a way to make it work. It's still a very special moment to me today when we figured out we can help out a school that is in as bad of a position as we were.”

Since 2007, Rapoport has served as a professor of law, among other administrative positions, at the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Rapoport received her B.A. from Rice University in 1982, graduating summa cum laude, and obtained her J.D. from Stanford Law School in 1985. After working as a Biglaw attorney for several years, she became drawn to legal teaching when her passions shifted to scholarly pursuits.

“I realized that what I liked more than anything else was thinking and writing about things that interested me, not necessarily that interested clients,” Rapoport said. “I liked training the junior associates, so I thought this could be a job for me. It has proven to be the perfect match for me because I do love teaching – my students are wonderful, and I love writing. I probably would do this job for free other than faculty meetings and grading exams.”