Research Expertise and Interest

bankruptcy, consumer law and protection

Research Description

Abbye Atkinson is a Professor of Law, and her research focuses on the law of debtors and creditors as it affects marginalized communities. Her work is forthcoming in the California Law Review and has been published in the Duke Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, Stanford Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, Arizona Law Review, Michigan Journal of Race & Law, the N.Y.U. Law Review Online, and the Texas Law Review Online. She has testified before the United States Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and she is the inaugural recipient of the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Scholar Award.

Before joining Berkeley Law, Atkinson was a Thomas C. Grey Fellow and Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School and the Reginald F. Lewis Fellow at Harvard Law School.  Previously she worked as an associate attorney in the San Francisco office of Gibson Dunn, and she served as a law clerk to the Honorable Ronald M. Gould of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and for the Honorable Marilyn Hall Patel of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. She graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School and earned her undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley. 

At UC Berkeley, Atkinson teaches Contracts, Poverty Law, Debt, Discrimination, and Inequality, and the Consumer Law and Economic Justice workshop.