Caroline L Davidson

Professor Davidson joined Willamette faculty in 2008. Her scholarship explores international and comparative criminal law and procedure, transitional justice, and human rights. In particular, it focuses on the relationship and tensions between human rights law and international criminal law, domestic responses to atrocity crimes, and criminal law responses to sexual and gender-based violence.

Davidson’s teaching and scholarship draw on her international legal experience. Prior to joining Willamette, Davidson worked as a prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, where she served on the trial teams in two complex, multi-defendant cases against military and civilian leaders for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. In 2005, she worked as a lawyer in the Prosecutor’s Office of the then newly-created State Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo. During law school, Davidson interned at Human Rights Watch in Brazil.

As an academic, Davidson has conducted research on domestic efforts to adjudicate atrocities as a Fulbright scholar at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, as a visiting scholar at the Universidad de Chile in Santiago, Chile, and as a research fellow at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Canada.

Davidson’s writing and teaching likewise are informed by her time as a public defender and civil litigator. She served as an assistant federal public defender in Portland, Oregon, where she represented clients in a variety of federal indictment matters and in federal habeas corpus litigation. She also worked as a litigation associate at Howard, Rice, Nemerovski, Canady, Falk & Rabkin (now Arnold & Porter) in San Francisco.

Davidson clerked for Judge Alfred T. Goodwin of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. She graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she was an executive editor of the Harvard Human Rights Journal. She studied history and romance languages at Princeton University, graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa.

Davidson speaks Spanish and French fluently and speaks some Portuguese, German, Italian. She is admitted to the state bar of Oregon (active) and California (inactive status).