Carliss Chatman is an award-winning legal scholar and professor, lawyer, author, and speaker who has dedicated service and leadership to her goal of democratizing access to information that moves critique and understanding from the page to real life while illuminating long-existing inequalities in aspects of the law that are often disregarded by those engaging in critical theory. Professor Carliss Chatman reimagines and reframes thinking on corporations and contract law considering the racialized and gendered impact of business decisions and the limits on the freedom to contract experienced by marginalized groups, with a focus on how both structure and culture combine with systemic legal norms to create inequalities and injustice. She also connects understanding of how to identify and pursue viable solutions to address these inequalities through the open comprehension of legal personhood, corporate governance, and legal ethics.
Carliss Chatman is an Associate Professor at Washington and Lee University School of Law specializing in the fields of corporate law, commercial law, ethics, and civil procedure. Professor Chatman brings 11 years of legal practice as a commercial litigation attorney in Houston, Texas working in complex commercial litigation, mass tort litigation and the representation of small and start-up businesses in the United States and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and lends it to a common sense approach to her teaching and scholarship, bringing practical experience to all of her classes, and making complex legal concepts within reach for students of all backgrounds. In practice, she focused on trial law, appeals and arbitration in pharmaceutical, healthcare, mass torts, product liability, as well as oil, gas and mineral law. In addition to negotiating settlements and obtaining successful verdicts, Professor Chatman has also analyzed and drafted position statements regarding the constitutionality of statutes and the impact of statutory revisions for presentation to the Texas Legislature.
Professor Chatman teaches an array of business law, commercial law, and ethics classes including: Contracts and Sales and Leases; Agency and Unincorporated Entities, Corporations, Business Associations, and Securities Regulation; Professional Responsibility; a Transactional Skills Simulation course with a Mergers and Acquisitions focus that incorporates corporate law and UCC Article 9; and a Start-UP Practicum that helps launch Black-owned businesses. Professor Chatman is the co-author of the casebook Business Organization: An Experiential Approach with Carla Reyes, published with the Carolina Academic Press in 2022. Her scholarship, teaching and service have been celebrated and awarded by her faculty and peers. She is the 2021 Recipient of Derrick A. Bell, Jr. Award, presented by the Association of American Law Schools Section on Minority Groups; the 2020 Recipient Jessine A. Monaghan Fellowship, an award for experiential education, given in recognition of contributions to the transactional component of the Law School’s experiential program; and the 2020 Recipient Lewis Prize for Excellence in Legal Scholarship, an award given to recognize outstanding legal scholarship supported by summer grants.
Professor Chatman's work is also influenced by over two decades of service on nonprofit boards and involvement with community organizations. Through leadership positions, she has developed expertise in corporate governance and non-profit regulation while actively advocating on behalf of non-profit organizations at state and federal legislatures and on matters involving race, women's rights, and educational access. Through service on the Advisory Board of Compliance.ai, she has worked on the cutting edge of legal regulatory technology, helping to train the machine learning platform to anticipate the research needs of those in the compliance and regulatory legal space.
Professor Chatman believes that legal scholarship is a component of movement lawyering, using her scholarship, casebook work, and non-traditional projects in conjunction with board service and collaborations with interdisciplinary scholars to build community across disciplines to pursue solutions focused on Black economic development, income and achievement gaps, and the formation of a thriving Black middle class. Her work critiques the neoliberal economic framing that permeates business and commercial law and filters solutions that consider the experience of marginalized persons.
When legal scholars discuss systemic inequality, they often ignore the impacts of private ordering and private law. Professor Chatman explores corporate personhood and analyzes corporate rights and human rights and the era of expanding corporate rights and disproportionate influence on government in a space where there is a decline in human rights and an upset in the balance of legal relationships. She is an Amazon Best-Selling author of Companies are People Too, a children's book on corporate personhood, using personhood as a framework to educate and inform general audiences about the nuances of status and the fundamentals of business and commerce. In addition to her more traditional scholarship, Professor Chatman writes for broader audiences in publications including: Slate, Time Magazine, CNN Online, TheGrio, Barron’s, and the Washington Post, with features in press pieces on Forbes and in the New York Times, and with media appearances on CBS News and CBS Radio, Propublica, Reuters, and NHK.
Professor Chatman is prolific on social media, lending the same practical and legally reasoned approach to public discourse that she provides in the classroom on a broad spectrum of issues. Professor Chatman has given academic lectures on corporate governance, corporate personhood, and legal ethics at universities internationally, including the University of Surrey in London, Bucconi University in Milan, and Scula Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa. She has spoken on teaching diverse groups of students at the American Association of Law Schools Annual Meeting, University of Arkansas Little Rock, Drexel University Kline School of Law, Stetson University College of Law, and at UC Berkeley School of Law. She has produced panels and her podcast, Getting Common is available on Spotify, Apple Music and replays via Voice America online radio. Professor Chatman is a 2004 graduate of the University of Texas School of Law, where she was a member of the Texas Journal of Women and the Law, and served on the Student Recruitment and Orientation Committee. She received her bachelor's degree in 2001 from Duke University with honors in English.
Click HERE to watch Carliss on CBS News.
On BBC: Discussion of TX 6-week Abortion Ban: BBC HEARTBEAT ACT
View Professor Chatman's CV HERE.
