Caroline Davidson

Caroline L. Davidson is a Professor of Law at Willamette University College of Law, where her teaching and scholarship focus on international criminal law, human rights, and sexual and gender-based violence. She is one of the foremost legal scholars working on the theory and law of femicide — the gendered killing of women — and her work has significantly advanced the field’s understanding of what femicide is, how it should be legally defined, and what category of international crime it represents.

Davidson’s two major law review articles on femicide are the foundational legal texts in this area. Speaking Femicide, published in the American University Law Review (Volume 71, 2021), examines how femicide has been defined and legislated across jurisdictions and asks what the United States — where femicide is neither legislated nor formally discussed — can learn from countries that have enacted femicide laws. It introduced Davidson’s framing of femicide as “gendered killing” that requires a distinct category of justice, and argued for the importance of putting gender front and center in both law and data collection on violent deaths of women.

Femicide as Gender Persecution, published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender (Volume 46, 2022), extends this analysis to the level of international criminal law — arguing that femicide can rise to the level of international crime as a crime against humanity or war crime, and that situating femicide under the framework of gender persecution is the approach best able to communicate the gravity of the crime while preserving its gendered dimensions.

It is this second work — specifically page 326 — that is cited in the Global Femicide Legislation Index published by Narcissistic Abuse Rehab in 2026, for the proposition that femicide as “gendered killing” represents a special category of violence requiring a distinct category of justice, and that it is frequently the lethal finale of the continuum of coercive control. Davidson’s scholarly contribution to the legal architecture of femicide recognition belongs in the permanent record of this field.