Evelyn Atkinson's book project is a history of corporate personhood in the nineteenth century. It focuses on the relationship between popular claims for corporate accountability and control and the development of the legal doctrine of constitutional corporate personhood. Evelyn received her PhD in History from the University of Chicago, her JD cum laude from Harvard Law School, and her BA from Sarah Lawrence College.
RESEARCH INTERESTS
History of the corporation, legal history, constitutional law, history of capitalism, 19th and 20th century U.S. history, tort law, intellectual history, history of the regulatory state
BOOK MANUSCRIPT
American Frankenstein: A History of the Constitutional Corporate Person in the Nineteenth Century (under contract with Columbia University Press)
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, forthcoming 2024).
—"Telegraph Torts: The Lost Lineage of the Public Service Corporation," 8 Michigan Law Review (forthcoming Spring 2023).
—"Frankenstein’s Baby: The Forgotten History of Corporations, Race, and Equal Protection," 108 Virginia Law Review 581 (2022).
—Stewart L. Winger, Jonathan W. White, eds. Ex Parte Milligan Reconsidered: Race and Civil Liberties from the Lincoln Administration to the War on Terror (Book Review), H-Net.com (March 2021).
—“From Public Servant to Private Business: Dartmouth College and the Transformation of the Corporation,” Blog Post for the Forum on the Bicentennial of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, HistPhil.org (June 18, 2019) (invited participant).
—"Slaves, Coolies, and Shareholders: Corporations Claim the Fourteenth Amendment." The Journal of the Civil War Era, vol. 10, no. 1 (Spring 2020): 54–80.
—"Creating the Reasonable Child: Risk, Responsibility, and the Attractive Nuisance Doctrine." Law & Social Inquiry (May 22, 2017).
—Awarded Fishel-Calhoun Article Prize by the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
—Book review. "Kevin Butterfield, The Making of Tocqueville’s America: Law and Association in the Early United States." Law and History Review 35, no. 1 (Feb. 2017): 261–63.
—"Out of the Household: Master-Servant Relations and Employer Liability Law." Yale Journal of Law & Humanities 25, no. 2 (Sum. 2013).
—"Abnormal Persons or Embedded Individuals: Tracing the Development of Informed Consent Restrictions for Abortion." Harvard Journal of Law and Gender 34 (Sum. 2011): 618–70.