Carliss Chatman

Biography

Carliss Chatman specializes in the fields of corporate law, commercial law, race and entrepreneurship, and ethics. Her scholarship has appeared in journals such as UCLA Law Review, Michigan Journal of Race and the Law, Texas Law Review, UC Irvine Law Review, Washington & Lee Law Review, and SMU Law Review. In addition, she is the co-author of a casebook, Business Enterprises: An Experiential Approach, and of a children’s book, Companies Are People Too.

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 startup 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.

In addition to her more traditional scholarship, Professor Chatman writes for broader audiences in publications including the Hill, Slate, Time Magazine, CNN Online, TheGrio, Barron’s, and the Washington Post; with features in press pieces in Bloomberg, Forbes, and in the New York Times; and with media appearances on CBS News and CBS Radio, ProPublica, Reuters, and NHK. 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 and African-American studies. She is currently a faculty affiliate of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center at Duke University.