Nancy B. Rapoport is the Gordon Silver Professor of Law at the William S. Boyd School of Law.Her article "Where Have All the (Legal) Stories Gone?" from the Fall 2009 issue of the Association of Media & Entertainment Counsel's M/E Insights, was cited by The Honorable Mark W. Bennett of the United States District Court in the Northern District of Iowa. Judge Bennett cited Professor Rapoport's work in his article "Eight Traits of Great Trial Lawyers: A Federal Judge's View on How to Shed the Moniker 'I Am a Litigator,'" published in the University of Texas School of Law's The Review of Litigation Winter 2014 issue.
Judge Bennett's article reads, "Is the legal academy to blame for poor storytelling skills among lawyers? While criticism of legal education is certainly reaching a modern-day zenith, it would be unfair to place too much of the blame on the education system, since '[n]arrative theory and storytelling have emerged as threads in legal scholarship steadily over the past 20 years.' Regardless, I have never heard any judge comment that lawyers are improving in the art of storytelling. Why is this? Perhaps Professor Nancy Rapoport described it best: Few law professors stay in touch with the practice of law [and, as a result, w] e just don’t have much credibility when it comes to telling students how lawyers work, or what good lawyers need to know, because few of us stayed long enough in the practice of law to have been considered good lawyers."
Professor Rapoport's specialties are bankruptcy ethics, ethics in governance, and the depiction of lawyers in popular culture.
