Janice Davidson

Chief Judge Janice Davidson joined IAALS in January 2014 as Senior Advisor to the Honoring Families Initiative.

Previously, she sat on the Colorado Court of Appeals for twenty-five years before retiring in 2013; she served as Chief Judge of the court since 2003. She graduated with Highest Honors from Skidmore College in 1966, and from the University of Pennsylvania School of Law in 1969. From 1969-1971, Chief Judge Davidson was an appellate attorney with the New York Legal Aid Society and was a Colorado State Public Defender from 1971-1973. She continued in public interest law, including nine years with the Colorado Attorney General’s Office until 1985, when she was appointed to the county court bench in Denver, where she served until her appointment in 1988 to the Colorado Court of Appeals.

Chief Judge Davidson served as the Chairperson of the Colorado Supreme Court Standing Committee on Appellate Rules for twenty-five years. During that time, she was also a member of the Colorado Supreme Court Standing Committee on Rules of Civil Procedure and the Colorado Standing Committee on Rules of Evidence. She was a contributing writer to the Colorado Appellate Handbook, First Edition, and is Managing Editor of the Second and Third Editions. In June 2012, Chief Judge Davidson was awarded the Mary Lathrop Trailblazer Award by the Colorado Women’s Bar Association, and, in October 2013, she received the Colorado Judicial Institute’s Distinguished Judicial Leadership Award.