[6] The experience of working with his activist mother taught Rapping about social justice, and trying to change things in the world that aren't fair or right.
[7] After high school, Rapping attended the University of Chicago where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics cum laude.
After his first year of law school at GWU, Rapping interned with the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, where he found his calling.
[6][permanent dead link] This led to her joining Rapping to start Gideon's Promise and, ultimately, to become the organization's Executive Director, where she advocates for attacking the pipeline on the back end.
[8] After law school, Rapping worked as a staff attorney for The Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia (1995–2004), where he served his final three years as training director.
In 2007, Rapping created the Southern Public Defender Training Center, subsequently renamed Gideon's Promise, along with his wife, Ilham Askia.
He is a thought leader in articulating the critical role public defenders must play in any comprehensive criminal justice reform strategy.
[16] In 2009, he laid out a vision for how to put this theory to practice in describing the work of the Southern Public Defender Training Center (the precursor to Gideon's Promise) in You Can't Build on Shaky Ground.
[19] Believing that well-intentioned professionals are shaped by a criminal justice system that has become unmoored from is foundational values, Rapping's vision involves supporting defenders as they struggle to resist the pressure to adapt to the status quo.
[21] He has examined how the American story of justice has evolved to a narrative that would be unrecognizable to our founding fathers in "Reviving the Hero Image of the Public Defender.
"[23] And in "Retuning Gideon's Trumpet," he answers skeptics who believe public defenders are only important to individuals and play no role in driving systemic reform.
As the nation grappled with a seeming epidemic of police killings of young black men like Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice, Rapping urged that we not see that issue as disconnected from "routine injustice" destroying poor communities of color every day.
Rapping's 2015 TEDx Atlanta talk[35] is a powerful articulation of the critical role of culture in shaping our criminal justice system and the importance of a public defender movement to transforming it.