Professor of Law. Internationally recognized thought and practice leader focused on compassionate conflict engagement. Teacher and advocate of mindfulness and social justice. Highly practiced facilitator. Renowned author. 

Rhonda is a Professor of Law at the University of San Francisco and an internationally-recognized thought and practice leader focused on integrating mindfulness into higher education, law, and social change work. She teaches mindfulness-based stress reduction interventions for lawyers, law students, and for minimizing social-identity-based bias. 

Rhonda has extensive experience in interpersonal dynamics-informed small group facilitation, (supported by training, retreats, and practice through a variety of programs, including Stanford University’s Interpersonal Dynamics Facilitator Program and the Gregory Kramer’s Insight Dialogue). 

As a teacher and writer, she is inspired by a commitment to compassionate conflict engagement and management; holistic problem-solving to alleviate the suffering of the vulnerable and injured; presence-based leadership in a diverse world, and humanizing approaches to education. 

Rhonda’s teaching practices are rooted in her experience as a student of a wide variety of Buddhist and other wisdom teachers, including Joan Halifax, Norman Fischer, and Jon Kabat Zinn. She trained as a mindfulness teacher through the Oasis Teacher Training Institute of the University of Massachusetts Center for Mindfulness.

Rhonda is a former President of the Board of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, and a Fellow of the Mind and Life Institute, she recently completed a 2-year term on its Steering Council. She is a member of the Board of Advisors of the University of Massachusetts Center for Mindfulness and the Chair of the Board of Directors for the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute. In October 2019, she received the Garrison Institute’s Insight + Impact Award.

Rhonda sees embodied mindfulness meditation and the allied disciplines of study and community engagement as keys to personal, interpersonal, and collective transformation in the face of the challenges and opportunities of our time.

She has dedicated her life to healing and teaching in ways that support others on a journey to wholeness and justice. 

She has been a guest teacher at a variety of prolific mindfulness teacher training programs and has served as leader or co-leader of retreats at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, the Garrison Institute, the Shambhala Mountain Center, the Omega Institute and New York Insight Meditation Center.

Rhonda is the author of numerous articles, essays and book chapters on the topics of Buddhism, mindfulness teaching and equity, mindfulness in legal education and teaching about race using mindfulness. In September 2019 she published her first book, The Inner Work of Racial Justice: Healing Ourselves and Transforming Our Communities Through Mindfulness. 

Rhonda received both a Master’s degree in Sociology from UVA’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and a Juris Doctorate from the UVA School of Law in 1993.