Professor Davis teaches Women and the Law; Immigration; Employment Discrimination; and Professional Responsibility. She is also a faculty director for the law school's Program on Human Rights and the Global Ecnonomy.

Prior to joining the law faculty in 2002, she was vice president and legal director for the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund. As a women's rights practitioner, she was counsel in a number of cases before the US Supreme Court, including Nguyen v. INS, a challenge to sex-based citizenship laws that Professor Davis argued before the court. Professor Davis has also served as a fellow at the Bunting Institute and as the innaugural Kate Stoneman Visiting Professor of Law and Democracy at Albany Law School. In 2003, she received a Soros Reproductive Rights Fellowship; her project focused on the potential for subnational activism using international human rights norms.

Professor Davis has written widely on women's rights, poverty and human rights. Her book, Brutal Need: Lawyers and the Welfare Rights Movement, received the Reginald Heber Smith Award for distinguished scholarship on the subject of equal access to justice, and was also honored by the American Bar Association in its annual Silver Gavel competition. Professor Davis sits on the boards of directors of the Welfare Law Center and the Workers Rights Law Center.

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