RALEIGH – Campbell Law School Dean Emerita and Professor of Law Melissa Essary will retire in May 2025, Campbell Law Dean J. Rich Leonard has announced. Friday’s commencement ceremony marks Essary’s final official duties, as she will hood the law school’s 183 graduates, the largest graduating class in the school’s 49-year history.
Essary made history in 2006 when she became the first woman to lead the law school. Three years later, she made history again by shepherding Campbell Law’s trailblazing move from Campbell University’s Buies Creek home to the state capital, as well as increasing law school applications to record levels.
Under her leadership, the student body grew from 345 in 2006 to 477 in 2012, accompanied by a significant increase in the academic credentials of entering students. She also achieved the highest minority enrollment in the history of the law school at the time and continued the law school’s tradition of having the highest overall bar passage rate in North Carolina on the July bar exam over the past 25 years, among other accomplishments.
In 2012, she stepped away from the dean’s position after six years and returned to the full-time faculty to teach employment law.
Essary came from the Baylor University School of Law in Texas, where she had served on the faculty for 16 years. Prior to that post, she practiced law professionally for five years, including service with Vinson & Elkins in Dallas, where she specialized in trial and appellate advocacy.
“Melissa Essary was the right person at the right time to lead our law school onto the next level,” said then Campbell University President Dr. Jerry M. Wallace. “Her leadership has been extraordinary in its breadth and stunning in its achievement.”
Her accomplishments as leader of Campbell Law include:
- Attracting the North Carolina Business Court, Raleigh Division, to the law school, thus joining only a handful of law schools across the country with such an addition.
- Greatly enhancing the school’s alumni relations around the state and throughout the Southeast.
- Conducting a successful Capital Campaign, which included the largest number of alumni gifts and the first $1 million gifts in the law school’s history.
- Expanding student externship opportunities more than 400 percent.
- Overseeing the hiring of highly credentialed faculty members from around the country.
- Presiding over the creation and expansion of multiple law school programs, such as an Intellectual Property Track and a strengthened program of Legal Research and Writing.
- Establishing academic partnerships with N.C. State University through the creation of dual degree programs in law (J.D.), public administration (MPA) and business administration (MBA).
- Helping create the school’s Senior Law Clinic, which served the elderly poor in Wake County for 10 years.
- Creating a Board of Visitors, to include locally and nationally prominent figures, such as Gen. William Suter, Clerk of the U.S. Supreme Court and N.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Sarah Parker.
- Creating a student-led Pro Bono Council, which provides countless hours of community service to nonprofit organizations each year in the Raleigh area.
“It has been my privilege to build on the law school’s tremendous success in North Carolina and lead it to even greater visibility across the country,” Essary said in 2012. “Campbell Law School has always been dedicated to producing great lawyers, and our ability to do so has been greatly enhanced by our Raleigh location. The law school is soaring toward new heights, and I am honored to have been its dean. I particularly want to thank my faculty and staff colleagues, who have worked tirelessly together as a team for the advancement of the law school, its role in legal education and the preparation of thousands of students.”
Essary has volunteered on numerous boards and committees including the Downtown Raleigh Alliance’s Executive Committee, the Eastern N.C. Chapter of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, the Board of Directors for the Raleigh Chamber of Commerce and as a member of the Board of Governors of the City Club in Raleigh. She also served as vice president of the Board of Governors of the North Carolina Bar Association (NCBA), an organization for which she has held various leadership roles since 2006. At the state level, she served as co-chair of the North Carolina Justice Center Board of Directors and was appointed by Chief Justices Mark Martin and Cheri Beasley to sequential terms on the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission. And at the national level, she has served as a site re-accreditation team member for the American Bar Association (ABA) and through her service with the Law School Admissions Council (LSAC) on its Emerging Markets and Innovation and Finance and Legal Affairs committees. She has also published a textbook, “Client Interviewing, Counseling, and Decision-Making: A Practical Approach.”
Essary’s numerous accolades have included being named as a Triangle Area Woman Extraordinaire, Business Impact Leader and Education Impact Leader by Business Leader Media. Most recently she has been honored as a “Woman of Change” by the Friends of the City of Raleigh Museum and among the “50 Most Influential Women in North Carolina” by N.C. Lawyers Weekly.
In a nod to her help coaching the first Campbell Law ABA Client Counseling Competition team to national and international titles, Dean Leonard surprised Essary by naming the law school’s new outdoor meeting space, “Essary Place,” when it was unveiled in 2021. The theme of the space is “Blessed Are the Peacemakers” and the six sculptures, were created and installed by renowned sculptor Thomas Sayre.
“There’s one person here today who is singularly responsible for the law school’s presence in Raleigh,” Leonard said during the dedication of Essary Place. “But, more importantly, in the classes she teaches, the friendships she forms, the way she mentors her students, how she brings competing views to a consensus. She’s the ultimate peacemaker. So with the approval of the trustees of Campbell University, our outdoor meeting space will forever be known as “Essary Place,” in honor of our beloved Dean Emerita. Her friends, as you can see from the donor plaque, made this possible. These were the easiest funds I ever raised.”
The outdoor meeting space, which was made possible, also in part thanks to a generous donation from the law school’s Student Bar Association, is reflective of the law school’s roots as well as its future, Sayre said. The reflective tops are each representative of a different symbol of peace from a different culture and included in the designs are poppies and olive branches, universal symbols of peace.
When asked by Attorney at Law magazine in a story that will be included in an upcoming national issue focused on female attorneys what she plans to do in retirement, Essary pronounced, “Everything. Everything.”
One of those things is to volunteer her time and talents helping Baptists on Mission. Another is to spend more time gardening and traveling with her husband, Larry Essary, who leads the law school’s IT department, and their two grown daughters, Amber and Rachel.
“My family is the wind beneath my wings,” she said. “Their love and sacrifice made my career possible.”