A prolific writer, she authored 30 books on subjects including legal ethics, gender and the law, and law and leadership; her major works include In the Interest of Justice, Justice and Gender, Speaking of Sex, Women and Leadership, Lawyers as Leaders, and The Beauty Bias.

[5][6] At New Trier High School during the late 1960s, she was a nationally ranked debater, competing against eventual Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland.

Originally she wanted to work on poverty and had no interest in feminism, but an advisor gave her reading by Simone de Beauvoir that transformed Rhode's perception of the world.

[8] Rhode became a member of Phi Beta Kappa[4] and the Yale debate team, becoming its first female president (a role previously held by William F. Buckley Jr. and John Kerry).

[6] She and others in the clinic wrote a manual for low-income clients who could not afford attorney's fees for uncontested divorces—drawing the ire of the local bar association—but she also decided the practice of law was not sustainable for her and found her calling instead in legal academia.

[6] She was also the first to teach a course on leadership for lawyers, lamenting that so many attorneys ended up in political positions of power without having any preparation for it as part of their legal education.

[9] During the Clinton administration, Rhode served as senior investigative counsel to the minority members of the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary and advised them on presidential impeachment issues.

[22][23] 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 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.

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.

[8] In 1976,[12] Rhode married Ralph Cavanagh,[6] a senior attorney and co-director of Natural Resources Defense Council's energy program with whom she had attended college and law school.