Law School Survival Manual: From LSAT to Bar Exam

Education
B.A., Summa Cum Laude, Rice University
J.D., Stanford Law School

Background
Nancy B. Rapoport is the Gordon Silver Professor at the William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. After receiving her B.A. and her J.D., she clerked for the Honorable Joseph T. Sneed on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and then practiced law (primarily bankruptcy law) with Morrison & Foerster in San Francisco from 1986-1991. She 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). She served as Dean of 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.

Her specialties are bankruptcy ethics, ethics in governance, and the depiction of lawyers in popular culture. She has taught Contracts, Sales (Article 2), Bankruptcy, Chapter 11 Reorganization, Legal Writing, Contract Drafting, Corporate Scandals, and Professional Responsibility. Among her published works is ENRON AND OTHER CORPORATE FIASCOS: THE CORPORATE SCANDAL READER 2D (Nancy B. Rapoport, Jeffrey D. Van Niel & Bala G. Dharan, eds.), which addresses the question of why we never seem to learn from prior corporate scandals. She is admitted to the bars of the states of California, Ohio, Nebraska, Texas, and Nevada and of the United States 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. She is a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and a Fellow 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.

Books

• Collier Compensation, Employment And Appointment Of Trustees And Professionals In Bankruptcy Cases (Lexis-Nexis 2009) (one of several updaters)
• Nancy B. Rapoport, Jeffrey D. Van Niel & Bala G. Dharan, Enron And Other Corporate Fiascos: The Corporate Scandal Reader, 2D (Foundation Press 2d ed. 2009)

Book Chapters

• Nancy B. Rapoport, Changing the Modal Law School: Rethinking U.S. Legal Education in (Most) Schools, in Zenon Bankowski, Maksymilian Del
• Mar & Paul Maharg, Beyond Text in Legal Education (Ashgate Press, forthcoming 2010) (solicited essay)
• Nancy B. Rapoport, Swimming with Shark, in Lawyers In Your Living Room: Law On The Small Screen 163 (Michael Asimow, ed., 2009) (solicited manuscript)
• Reflections of a Former Dean, in Law School Leadership Strategies: Top Deans on Benchmarking Success, Incorporating Feedbackfrom
• Faculty and Students, and Building the Endowment 199 (2006)
• Bankruptcy Ethics Issues for Solos and Small Firms, in Attorney Liability in Bankruptcy (Corinne Cooper, ed. & Catherine E. Vance, Contributing ed. 2006) (solicited manuscript)

Education
B.A., Criminal Justice, Ohio University
J.D., Capital University Law School, Cum Laude

Background
Jeffrey D. Van Niel is a native of Columbus, Ohio. He enlisted in the United States Marine Corps immediately after graduating from high school in 1976. After four years of service in the Marines as a scout sniper, he received an Honorable Discharge and joined the Ohio State Highway Patrol. He left the Highway Patrol in 1981 to get a Bachelor's Degree in Criminal Justice at Ohio University in 1983. He started law school in 1984 in lieu of joining the Secret Service (and never looked back). Mr. Van Niel served as Executive Notes Editor for the Capital University Law Review, and he was graduated from Capital University Law School in 1987, cum laude, having received the honors of the Order of the Curia and the Order of the Barristers. He clerked for Ohio Supreme Court Justice Andrew Douglas after graduation, and then he joined the Cleveland, Ohio law firm of Hahn Loeser Parks in 1988. When one of the firm's partners became the Ohio Attorney General, Mr. Van Niel followed him to serve in the Ohio Attorney General's Public Utilities Commission Practice Group. He volunteered for a second tour of duty with the Supreme Court of Ohio in 1993 as the Court's Utilities Law Master Commissioner. Moving from Ohio to Nebraska to Houston (to join his wife at each of her academic positions), Mr. Van Niel worked as a consultant until 2004, when he joined the Harris County Community Service and Corrections Department as Staff Counsel. Mr. Van Niel moved to Las Vegas and became a consultant in regulatory and governmental affairs to Nye County in the Yucca Mountain licensing proceeding in October 2007. He is admitted to the bars of the states of Ohio, Nebraska, Texas, and Nevada, and he served as a former bar examiner in Ohio.