Camille M. Davidson
Committed to helping students find their purpose through legal education
Camille Davidson started on July 1, 2024, as president and dean of Mitchell Hamline School of Law. She came to Mitchell Hamline after a journey that began in her home state of Mississippi and would take her to multiple destinations including Kenya, Washington, D.C., North Carolina, and Illinois. A child of educators, she began her career as a practicing attorney but gravitated toward higher-education teaching and administration. The content below includes excerpts from a feature on Davidson in the Summer 2024 edition of Mitchell Hamline Law.
In the spring of 1998, after a long legal battle, the state of Mississippi released the records from its infamous Sovereignty Commission. The nearly 125,000 pages of files detailed 17 years of state-sanctioned spying, harassment, infiltration, and other measures beginning in the mid-1950s designed to stop the spread of civil rights and maintain segregation.
Camille Davidson’s father was in the report; her uncle was also listed among those the state surveilled. Even more shocking was that her dad’s parents were listed as “future possible agitators,” Davidson said, “simply because they were middle-aged Black people in Mississippi in the ’60s who chose to exercise their right to vote.” It was “jarring,” she said, to learn that their neighbors, people she had known all her life, had been interviewed by agents of the state about her grandparents: Were they good citizens? Could they be trusted?
The subject is still difficult for her to talk about—the hatred and suspicion her parents and grandparents endured at the hands of the state, the sacrifices they made so that later generations would have it better.
But it made the importance of her chosen profession—the law—abundantly clear. “It helps me to remind students of thinking about the why: why you’re in law school, why you’ve chosen law school, and what it is that you want to do with your law degree. I think law is the one profession where individuals really can make a difference. Democracy is fragile, it’s only as strong as any of us allow it to be, and so to be a part of the solution rather than the problem is important for me.”
Camille Davidson Facts
Hometown: Born and raised in Oxford, Miss.
Family: Husband Trevor Fuller, son Jackson, daughter Schuyler
J.D.
Georgetown University Law Center
Postgraduate Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholar
University of Nairobi, Nairobi, Kenya, East Africa
B.A.
Millsaps College, Jackson, Miss.
![Camille Davidson](https://mitchellhamline.edu/about/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/Camille-Davidson_750x750_high-res.jpg)
“The only way to have real access to justice is to train folks from a particular community so that they’re really able to provide the resources to their community. Mitchell Hamline’s different pathways provide so many opportunities for folks to join us in the profession.”
Biography and bibliography
A native of Oxford, Mississippi, Davidson earned a bachelor’s degree from Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, and a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center. She spent the first 13 years of her career as a practicing attorney, working in the public sector and also in private practice. In 2004, she began a transition to education as an adjunct at Davidson College, followed by stints at Charlotte School of Law and Wake Forest University School of Law. In 2020, she became dean at Southern Illinois University Simmons Law School. In 2024, Davidson became the third president and dean at Mitchell Hamline School of Law and the first Black woman to serve as president and dean at Mitchell Hamline or any of its predecessor schools.
Introducing Camille Davidson
The draw to Mitchell Hamline
Davidson saw in Mitchell Hamline “the best of two things that were important to me”—a trusted source of legal talent for the state and region as well as the national leader in innovative approaches to legal education. She called blended learning “the cutting edge of the future of legal education that has extended access to many who would have had no other way to earn a J.D. So many schools are trying to figure out how to do hybrid and online delivery of legal education, but the blended program to me is the standard which so many other law schools are looking at as a how-to manual.”
The other strong draw to Mitchell Hamline was the chance to lead an independent law school. After learning the fundamentals of legal teaching and administration at Charlotte Law and then leading a law school at SIU but within the larger university system, she’s excited by the opportunity to lead a freestanding law school, in partnership with the board of trustees, especially one committed to making it possible for all kinds of people from all kinds of backgrounds, geographies, and life situations to figure out their own “why” through the study of law.
Camille Davidson in the news
- Camille M. Davidson earns Women of Distinction Award The Southern, May 2024
- Mitchell Hamline names new president and dean, Mitchell Hamline News, February 2024
- Camille Davidson: A champion of legal education nurturing the next generation theeducationmagazine.com
Why I became a lawyer and educator
Securing the largest gift in Southern Illinois University history
After Charlotte Law closed, Davidson taught as an adjunct at Wake Forest University School of Law and then served as a judicial hearing officer. She became dean of Southern Illinois University School of Law in July 2020—the first Black woman to hold that job.
She started at SIU Law at the height of Covid. Along with addressing the challenges of the pandemic, the school needed to expand the admissions pool and shore up financial support. With no professional fundraising experience and minimal staff, Davidson started calling people, emailing, and setting up Zoom meetings. She started with the law school’s first class—which entered in 1973—and built from there. The school celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2023—punctuated with a gala in March—which was another touch point for conversations with alumni. “As I met with alums I listened. I listened a lot. I listened to what made them happy, I listened to what they enjoyed about their law school experience.” She secured one gift to fund a summer pipeline program for prospective students and another from an alum, a trial attorney, who named a courtroom at the school after her longtime partner.
She also held conversations with John Simmons, who earned his undergraduate degree from the Edwardsville campus of SIU. Although he was not a law school alumnus, as a practicing attorney in southern Illinois he saw great potential in SIU Law as a source of legal talent to strengthen the region, and over a few years of conversations with Davidson, it became clear this was in perfect sync with her view. Rather than try to outcompete the elite schools, Davidson said, “I felt like we needed to recognize that here’s who we are, here’s our impact, and let’s let our light shine.” Simmons and his wife decided to donate $10 million to the law school, the largest gift in the university’s history. The school is now called the SIU Simmons Law School.
“In our very first meeting, John committed to hiring two students for a summer internship with his firm as a way to build a pipeline. We continued to talk about the law school,” Davidson said. “Ultimately I think it was him putting trust in our vision and seeing the impact the school had in producing lawyers to serve the region.
“I believe so much in the power of relationships and listening,” she said. “If I have a superpower, it is probably the ability to connect with pretty much all people. I’m going to find a connection in some sort of way, and probably after we sit down and talk for a half hour we’re going to figure out where our lives have intersected and what we have in common. So that’s been my strength as a fundraiser.”