Kamille Adair-Morgan
“THE PHRASE ‘family is everything’ really resonates with me. Family has been integral to all my successes.” Those are the sentiment shared by 29-year-old Kamille Adair-Morgan, whose village raised her as a child to become one of the leading game changers in the field of law.
Adair-Morgan did not always aspire to be a lawyer. In fact, she initially wanted to be an accountant. Working assiduously to make her dreams a reality, she achieved straight A’s during her years at Ardenne High School. Aside from being an avid student, she would pivot on the courts, making her mark as a netballer.
It wasn’t until the end of high school that she realised that she wanted to give a career in justice a fair trial. “I worked on an independent project on women enfranchisement in Afghanistan in lower sixth form and gained tremendous insight into how law touches and concerns every aspect of life and its power to transform social constructs. I also began then to appreciate law in its international dimension. By the time I completed high school, I had no doubt that I wanted to pursue a career in law,” she told Flair.
In her first year of law school, she realised right out the gate that a great measure of maturity and self-discipline was required, and she was a bit daunted by the challenge. “Studying alongside colleagues who were more advanced in age and stage of life, some of whom had already successfully completed degrees at UWI, assisted me greatly with meeting that challenge,” she said.
Fast-forward to Norman Manley. Before, Adair-Morgan would not only bury herself in her books, she would hide behind them too, letting her work speak for itself. But those last two years of school, she had to move from behind the scenes and
take centre stage, since effective advocacy, a requirement, now included writing and speaking to frequent evaluation and scrutiny. When she was selected to be the valedictorian, she was honoured.
Since graduating with first class honours from the law programme at Norman Manley Law School, she went on to become Jamaica’s Rhodes Scholar in 2012, earning a master’s in international economic law. She won the Winter Williams Prize at the University of Oxford and was lauded in New York for her achievement. Dubbed the moot queen, she has entered and won, judged and even hosted several competitions overseas. She returned home where it all started, giving back to students as a lecturer at the Faculty of Law at the University of the West Indies, Mona. She is also reading for the Doctorate of Philosophy in Law at Mansfield College, University of Oxford, online. When she doesn’t have her head in the books, she spends quality time being a devoted Christian, loving wife and amazing mother.