LEXINGTON, Ky. — Interim Dean Mary J. Davis has been named dean of the law school pending approval by the UK Board of Trustees and effective Jan. 1, 2021. Davis will become the first woman to serve in the role as a dean at the college.
Davis has served on the faculty since 1991. She began a tenure as interim dean on July 1, 2019, as the college transitioned from its two-year temporary location into a $56 million rebuild on its original site. Prior to becoming interim dean, Davis served as chair of the college’s building committee. In this role, she was instrumental, from design through construction, in the College of Law having a facility to provide a 21st-century legal education through teaching, learning, research, practical skills training, and co-curricular programming.
She joined the law faculty at UK after spending six years in products liability litigation defense practice for the law firms of Womble, Carlyle, Sandridge & Rice in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and McGuire, Woods, Battle & Boothe in Richmond, Virginia. Her practice experience involved the management of nationwide litigation and she is a leading scholar in the nation in the field of product liability.
Davis is a 1985 magna cum laude graduate of the Wake Forest University School of Law, where she served as managing editor of the law review, and a 1979 cum laude graduate of the University of Virginia.
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