Education
Mitchell earned a Bachelor of Arts from Queen's University at Kingston in 1979. The institution was established as Queen's College at Kingston when the Church of Scotland obtained a royal charter from Queen Victoria on 16 October 1841, and its first classes, held in 1842, were intended to prepare students for the ministry. Modelled on the universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, it received university status in 1881, and in the early twentieth century, after changes to its charter, it separated from the Presbyterian Church and adopted the name Queen's University at Kingston. In 1869 it became the first Canadian university west of the Maritime provinces to admit women.
Mitchell completed a Bachelor of Laws at Dalhousie University in 1983. At that time the law faculty was known as Dalhousie Law School, founded in 1883 as the oldest university-based common law school in Canada. Its curriculum placed distinctive emphasis on public law, constitutional history and international law, while its early model was influenced by Harvard Law School. The school moved in 1966 to the Weldon Law Building on Dalhousie's Studley Campus, and its tradition of public service is associated with its first dean, Richard Chapman Weldon. The school was renamed the Schulich School of Law in 2009 after a gift from Seymour Schulich.
Admission to the Ontario bar in 1985 followed these academic stages and qualified her to practise law in Ontario.
