Deborah L. Rhode, a law professor who transformed the field of legal ethics from little more than a crib sheet for passing the bar exam into an empirically rich, morally rigorous investigation into how lawyers should serve the public, died on Jan. 8 at her home in Stanford, Calif. She was 68.

Her husband, Ralph Cavanagh, confirmed her death but said that the cause had not yet been determined.

With 30 books and some 200 law review articles to her name, Professor Rhode, who spent over four decades teaching at Stanford, was by far the most-cited scholar in legal ethics, with a work ethic that astounded even her hard-charging colleagues.

“She was done with all her chapters before I started mine,” said David J. Luban, a law professor at Georgetown and one of her co-authors on “Legal Ethics,” a casebook now in its eighth edition.

To Professor Rhode, the core issues in legal ethics were not about bar association rules, but the politics and interests behind those rules, especially those that limited who could practice law and how lawyers should go about providing services to people who could not afford them.

“In her view, it wasn’t enough to memorize rules or espouse airy principles," said Nora Freeman Engstrom, a fellow law professor at Stanford. “Legal ethics — and legal ethics scholars — would have to refocus on what matters: access to justice, integrity, accountability, and equality.”

She relentlessly criticized the American Bar Association, which she believed was too focused on barriers to entry that undermined innovation and kept legal fees high. Such was her intellectual standing that in 2014 the association nevertheless gave her its Outstanding Scholar Award.

Professor Rhode was equally concerned with issues of gender and the legal profession, a subject she knew well from deep personal experience. As one of a handful of women at Yale Law School in the mid-1970s, and later as only the second woman to receive tenure at Stanford Law School, she found herself constantly harassed, demeaned and excluded by colleagues.

When she arrived at Stanford in 1979, she had wanted to teach gender and the law, but the dean refused, telling her to pick a “real subject.” She agreed to teach contracts instead, but changed her mind two years later when the dean retired, and several alumni threw him a party — and invited a stripper.

“I said to hell with contracts,” she later wrote.

But progress on gender-equity issues brought its own complications. As women made their way into law firms and legal faculties — among other professions — during the 1980s and ’90s, it became easy to conclude that sex discrimination had disappeared, or was fast on its way to disappearing, what Professor Rhode referred to as the “no-problem problem.”

Through law review articles and countless opinion pieces in publications like The Times, The New Republic and Slate, she documented all the barriers that women still faced, among them unconscious bias, unequal pay, lack of mentors, stereotypes and inflexible workplace structures.

In 2000 she wrote an Op-Ed for The Times about her distaste for high heels and the social mores that demand women wear them — an article that became the seed for one of her best-known books, “The Beauty Bias: The Injustice of Appearance in Life and Law” (2010).

Indeed, many of her books, which at times ranged far beyond gender and legal ethics into topics like leadership, character and ambition, were rooted in her personal experience. “What Dogs Deserve?” a forthcoming book about how the law treats canine companions, sprang from her relationship with her cocker spaniel, Stanton.

“It’s amazing how prolific she was,” said Leslie C. Levin, a professor of legal ethics at the University of Connecticut. “She would look at things people take for granted and show what was wrong with it.”

Deborah Lynn Rhode was born on Jan. 29, 1952, in Evanston, Ill., and grew up in the nearby Chicago suburbs of Wilmette and Kenilworth. Her father, Frederick Rhode, was an advertising executive, and her mother, Hertha (Hartung) Rhode, was a social worker.

She is survived by her husband and her sister, Christine Rhode.

Ms. Rhode attended New Trier East High School, where she was a champion debater, often facing off against another future legal star, Merrick Garland, the federal judge nominated to be attorney general in the Biden administration, who attended Niles West High School nearby.

Arriving at Yale in 1970 as part of what was only the school’s second coed class, Ms. Rhode found herself with almost no female professors or organizations dedicated to women’s issues. Female undergraduates, she later wrote, were intended to be seen and not heard.

But Ms. Rhode made sure she was heard. She was the first woman elected president of the Yale Debate Association, following in the footsteps of John Kerry and William F. Buckley Jr. and defeating her future husband, Mr. Cavanagh, by a resounding 23 to 3 vote.

“I followed her with keen interest after that,” Mr. Cavanagh said in an interview.

Despite her academic success, Ms. Rhode continued to confront obstacles based on her gender. Although Yale was coed, the Yale Club in New York City was not. When she insisted on entering anyway, she was escorted out. She also found it difficult to land clerkships; many judges more or less refused to hire women.

Two who didn’t were Judge Murray I. Gurfein, of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, for whom she worked after graduating, and Justice Thurgood Marshall of the Supreme Court, where Ms. Rhode took an office down the hall from her old debating adversary, Mr. Garland, a clerk for Justice William Brennan.

Justice Marshall encouraged her interest in becoming a law professor, though he teased her about teaching gender discrimination. “In most of the country,” he joked, “it seems to come naturally.”

For several years Professor Rhode was one of only two women out of 38 members of the Stanford law faculty, and she often bore the weight of institutional sexism. Colleagues often confused the two women — despite the fact that Professor Rhode, blonde and petite, looked nothing like Barbara Babcock, the other woman professor, who was taller and brunette. When the two circulated a letter urging the school to hire more women, colleagues demeaned it as the “Barbara and Deb need a friend” memo, she later said.

Professor Rhode persisted, and her prolific scholarship and mentoring of female students and junior faculty began to change the gender demographics of the law school — and, more broadly, to challenge the insidious ways that sex discrimination persisted in a society that claimed to be overcoming it.

She remained a fierce debater. When, in 1990, Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School had to pull out of a public debate with her over the ethics of the adversary system, she went ahead solo, presenting both sides — and two rebuttals — walking calmly from one podium to the other between speeches.

Two of her first major books, “Justice and Gender: Sex Discrimination and the Law” (1989) and “Speaking of Sex: The Denial of Gender Inequality” (1997), established her as a leading authority on the subject. In 1998, when Richard A. Gephardt, the House minority leader, was gearing up for the Clinton impeachment hearings, he asked an aide to locate the top expert on legal ethics and gender. Soon Professor Rhode found herself in Washington as counsel to the House Judiciary Committee.

Among her duties, Professor Rhode had to review the tapes that Linda Tripp secretly made of conversations with Monica Lewinsky and remove any sexual material irrelevant to the proceedings. Having taken an oath of secrecy, Ms. Rhode refused to tell even her husband about the salacious details, except to say there were a lot.

Despite publishing so much, Professor Rhode put a priority on her teaching — with a graceful, witty style, her lectures peppered with references to Sartre and “House of Cards” — and her colleagues, especially new faculty members.

“Soon after I started, she burst into my office and said, ‘We’re going to go on a walk once a week,’” Professor Engstrom said. “She would ask me about what I was working on, what issues I had in the classroom.”

She didn’t take no for an answer. Once, when Professor Engstrom begged off, saying she didn’t have walking shoes, Professor Rhode promptly handed her a pair of her own.

Professor Rhode was prolific enough that she still has two books waiting for publication. Along with “What Dogs Deserve?” there is “Ambition,” scheduled for publication this spring.

In it, she writes about what constitutes happiness.

“Enduring satisfaction,” she writes, “is most often a byproduct of participating in worthwhile activities that do not have happiness as their primary goal. Ultimate fulfillment comes from a sense of remaining true to core ideals, and principles and of using life for something of value that outlasts it.”

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