Abdel Rahman Zuabi was born in Sulam, a village in northern Israel near Afula. He studied law at the Tel Aviv School of Law and Economics (which would later become the law faculty of Tel Aviv University and completed his studies in 1958, becoming the first Arab to graduate from the institution. He was granted a license to practice law in 1960 and joined the law office of Moshe Amar. He worked as a lawyer in Haifa and Nazareth until 1978, when he was appointed a judge on the Nazareth District Court. He was a member of the Shamgar Commission, which investigated the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre in 1994.