Evelyn Atkinson
Charles E. Lugenbuhl Associate Professor of Law
Biography
Evelyn Atkinson is the Charles E. Lugenbuhl Associate Professor of Law at Tulane Law School and the Murphy Institute, where she teaches constitutional law, legal history, and a seminar on Race, Law, and Capitalism. Her book manuscript, under contract with Columbia University Press's Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism series, is entitled American Frankenstein: A History of the Constitutional Corporate Person in the Nineteenth Century.
Atkinson's scholarship has been published in the Virginia Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, Journal of Law & Social Inquiry, the Law and History Review, the Yale Journal of Law & Humanities, and the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender. She has been a Robert Gordon/Stanford Law School Fellow at the J. Willard Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History and a Doctoral Fellow in Law & Inequality at the American Bar Foundation. Among other distinctions, she is the recipient of the Kathryn T. Preyer Award from the American Society for Legal History and the Fishel-Calhoun Article Prize from the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
Atkinson received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago, her J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School, and her B.A. in liberal arts from Sarah Lawrence College.
Publications
- AMERICAN FRANKENSTEIN: A HISTORY OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL CORPORATE PERSON IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY (under contract with Columbia University Press, Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism).
- Telegraph Torts: The Lost Lineage of the Public Service Corporation, 121 MICHIGAN LAW REVIEW 8 (2023).
- Frankenstein’s Baby: The Forgotten History of Corporations, Race, and Equal Protection, 108 VIRGINIA LAW REVIEW 581 (2022).
- Slaves, Coolies, and Shareholders: Corporations Claim the Fourteenth Amendment, 10 Journal of the Civil War Era 54 (Spring 2020)
- Creating the Reasonable Child: Risk, Responsibility, and the Attractive Nuisance Doctrine, 42 Law & Social Inquiry 1122 (2017).
- Kevin Butterfield, The Making of Tocqueville’s America: Law and Association in the Early United States (Book Review), 35 Law and History Review 261 (2017).
- Out of the Household: Master-Servant Relations and Employer Liability Law, 25 Yale Journal of Law & Humanities 205 (2013).
Education & Affiliations
- Ph.D., History, University of Chicago
- J.D. cum laude, Harvard Law School
- B.A., Liberal Arts, Sarah Lawrence College
