Professor Susan Bisom-Rapp

Susan Bisom-Rapp is the Dean Steven R. Smith Professor of Law at California Western School of Law (CWSL). She served as Vice Dean for Academic Affairs in 2022-2023. She was the 2021 Chair of the Association of America Law Schools Section on Women in Legal Education.

Professor Bisom-Rapp is an internationally recognized scholar in the field of international and comparative employment law, who has published widely. Her latest book, co-authored with Malcolm Sargeant, is "Lifetime Disadvantage, Discrimination and the Gendered Workforce" (Cambridge 2016). A member of the American Law Institute since 2007, she also serves on the Academic Council of the Marco Biagi Foundation at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy, and on the Editorial Board of the Employee Rights and Employment Policy Journal. She became a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation in 2018.  She received the 2019 Paul Steven Miller Memorial Award for outstanding academic and public contributions to the field of labor and employment law scholarship. In 2024, she was elected a member of the Labor Law Group, a national learned society.

Before joining the faculty of CWSL, she was a tenured Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Faculty Reserch and Scholarship at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, where she was voted 2020 Professor of the Year by the student body.

Prior to her academic career, she practiced law at Stroock & Stroock & Lavan in New York City. She holds JSD and LLM degrees from Columbia University, where she was a Wien fellow and received a dissertation grant from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, a JD from the University of California at Berkeley, from which she graduated Order of the Coif and where she was a Cowell fellow, and a BS from Cornell University.