Professor Sternlight is the Michael and Sonja Saltman Professor of Law at the UNLV Boyd School of Law, where she also directs the Saltman Center for Conflict Resolution. She received her B.A. (Phi Beta Kappa and High Honors) from Swarthmore College and her J.D. (cum laude) from Harvard University, where she served as editor in chief of the Harvard Civil Liberties - Civil Rights Law Review. Professor Sternlight then clerked for federal judge Marilyn Hall Patel in California and subsequently practiced plaintiff-side employment law in Philadelphia.

Professor Sternlight started her academic career at Florida State University School of Law, where she received tenure, and then moved to the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Law, where she was the John D. Lawson Professor of Law and also a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Dispute Resolution. She joined the Boyd faculty in 2003.

Sternlight is nationally and internationally recognized for her scholarship and law reform activities in the field of dispute resolution. Her most recent book, Psychology for Lawyers: Understanding the Human Factors in Negotiation, Litigation and Decisionmaking (with Jennifer Robbennolt) was published by the American Bar Association in 2012. She has also co-authored texts on alternative dispute resolution, arbitration, and mediation, and has published numerous articles in many journals including the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Stanford Law Review, and Law and Contemporary Problems. She is frequently cited by courts and the press as an expert with respect to "mandatory" arbitration. Professor Sternlight often teaches Civil Procedure/Alternative Dispute Resolution, Arbitration, Psychology and Lawyering, and other courses in Dispute Resolution.

She received the 2015 American Bar Association Section of Dispute Resolution Award for Outstanding Scholarly Work and the 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award from the American College of Civil and Trial Mediators.