Following her Supreme Court clerkship, in 1979 Rhode joined the faculty of Stanford Law School as an associate professor, becoming the third woman on the faculty, after
Barbara Babcock and assistant professor
Carol Rose (Rose left at the end of Rhode's first year). In 1991 article, she coined the term
"The 'No-Problem' Problem" to describe the fundamental challenge, she argued, in advocating for women's rights was a problem of perception—the sense that a problem did not exist to need solving. Rhode was an elected fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was also the most-cited legal scholar in legal ethics, as found in 2007 and 2015 studies, and was the third most-cited female legal scholar overall. A 2012 study identified Rhode as one of the 50 most relevant law professors in the United States.
Books Rhode was the author of 30 books, It was a subject she returned to repeatedly in the course of her career, probing discrimination, the reasons it persisted and the possible paths to change. In her 1997 book,
Speaking of Sex: The Denial of Gender Inequality, Rhode dealt with the issue that women's gains made advocating for the inequities that remained more difficult. She argued that recognition of the persisting gender gap was a necessary precondition for further progress. A
New York Times reviewer found the book "scrupulously researched, balanced, sobering and sober", though worried that its "focus... on hard research rather than easy
sensationalism" might lose the audience. Among Rhode’s novel solutions to some elements of gender discrimination was a proposal that discrimination on the basis of appearance should be subject to constitutional scrutiny, laid out in her 2010 book
The Beauty Bias: The Injustice of Appearance in Life and Law. Legal ethics and other aspects of the professional lives of lawyers figured significantly into her books as the object of critique and proposals for change. In 2000, Rhode published
In the Interests of Justice: Reforming the Legal Profession. In a review for
Legal Ethics,
Barry Sullivan described Rhode's concern with the practice of law in the United States tackled in the book: that the legal profession "is insufficiently accountable to the public, that it falls far short of fulfilling its responsibilities to the society it ostensibly serves, that the best interests of its members are not well served by the current organisation and practices of the profession, that the membership of the profession is insufficiently diverse, and that the profession therefore requires radical reform." Rhode drew praise as a prose stylist. In a review of her 2013 book
Lawyers as Leaders, Daniel Reynolds wrote, "While the findings of social science can often seem cold and lifeless on the page, Professor Rhode manages to present them vividly: in every paragraph, in nearly every sentence, she offers telling examples or memorable quotations coloring the portrait of the successful leader and the failed one, too. From
P.G. Wodehouse to Justice Thurgood Marshall,
Erasmus of Rotterdam to
Richard Nixon: reading Rhode is a rat-a-tat-tat of the
mot juste, the perfect anecdote to be savored and saved for future use." The book grew out of her course on the subject. ==Personal life==