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 a Professor of Law at Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law and a Faculty Affiliate at the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. A nationally recognized scholar of corporate law, race, and governance, her work bridges academic research, legal education, and public discourse.
Professor Chatman’s scholarship explores how corporate law, contracts, and business structures reinforce systemic inequality and racial capitalism. Her most recent article, 1981, published in the Washington and Lee Law Review, examines how legal and economic systems undermine the promise of civil rights protections for Black Americans. Her current projects include Contracting for Reparations, Corporate Colonization and Total Governance Through Activism—a co-authored exploration of how activism is reshaping corporate power in the wake of DEI backlash.
She is a co-author of the casebook Business Enterprises: An Experiential Approach and a contributor to Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Corporate Law. Her work appears in leading journals including UCLA Law Review, Texas Law Review, UC Irvine Law Review, and Michigan Journal of Race and the Law, and has been featured in Bloomberg Law, The Washington Post, CNN, and NPR.
Professor Chatman is a frequent speaker at national and international conferences and has presented her work across North America and Europe, including at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, McGill University, The University of Milan, and Bocconi University in Milan. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the AALS Derrick A. Bell Award, the Lutie A. Lytle Outstanding Scholar Award, and the SMU Dedman Black Law Students Association’s Faculty of the Year Award.
A former practicing attorney, Professor Chatman brings a transactional lens to her teaching and is deeply committed to experiential legal education. She teaches Business Enterprises, Contracts, Commercial Law, Professional Responsibility, and Race, Entrepreneurship, and the Law.
She is the founder and chair of the AALS Section on Race and Private Law and a founder of the LSA CRN on Race and Private Law.
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.
