By Gwyneth K. Shaw
Berkeley Law Professor Abbye Atkinson knows what it’s like on both sides of the tenure line. So when Dean Erwin Chemerinsky approached her about stepping into the role of associate dean for faculty development and research, she was intrigued.
“This seemed like an opportunity to view the law school, and my colleagues, through a new lens,” says Atkinson, who joined the Berkeley Law faculty in 2017 and earned tenure in 2023.
Already, Atkinson — a popular teacher known for forging deep connections with students — is enjoying the opportunity to help shepherd the school’s outstanding junior faculty as they move along their own path toward tenure. It’s a key element of the associate dean role.
“One of the best parts about being at Berkeley is my colleagues, and this job is giving me an even closer look,” she says. “I’m especially eager to work with my junior colleagues, who are wonderfully accomplished and deserving of recognition for their scholarship.”
One of the things Berkeley Law does best — better than any other law school, she says — is to recognize potential stars when they’re on the academic job market, then give them a chance to develop as scholars and teachers, not just with space but support. Ideally, Atkinson says, she can help pre-tenure faculty “relax into their brilliance” and focus on their research.
“The associate dean for faculty development and research is a vital role in the law school, for the mentoring of faculty and in overseeing our promotion, tenure, and merit process. Professor Abbye Atkinson is the perfect person for this role,” Chemerinsky says. “She combines excellence in teaching, scholarship, and service, with great personal skills. I am very grateful to her for taking on this important responsibility.”
A scholarly evolution
Atkinson says her own work has benefited from the input of her Berkeley Law colleagues, and the growth and evolution of a faculty group studying issues around consumer law has been a source of inspiration and support. She and Professor Jonathan D. Glater are faculty co-directors of the Berkeley Center for Law & Economic Justice, founded and run by Ted Mermin ’96, and Professors Abhay Aneja, Alina Ball, Colleen V. Chien ’02, Chris Jay Hoofnagle, Prasad Krishnamurthy, and Manisha Padi are faculty advisors to the center.
Since getting tenure, Atkinson says she’s been able to stretch her scholarly muscles a bit. And she’s expanded her teaching topics as well: Contracts and Poverty Law and Policy have been constants, and she’s also added Consumer Bankruptcy and Economic Fragility and the Consumer Law and Economic Justice Workshop to her repertoire.
This fall, she’s teaching Law and Policy of Homelessness with Assistant Dean of Clinical Education Laura Riley, a new course exploring how legal systems and policy decisions influence the causes and responses to homelessness, particularly after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2024 City of Grants Pass v. Johnson decision.
“I started my career writing about specifically consumer bankruptcy, and that was the heart of my pre-tenure work,” Atkinson says. “But my broader interests have always been in thinking about economic inequality more generally, and considering the credit-debt relationship both in its contractual context and as another type of human relationship that has implications for people’s well-being.”
Atkinson is at work on co-authoring a new edition of a poverty law casebook and a project examining what she calls “economic citizenship,” or how access to credit and interactions in marketplaces speaks to the bigger question of citizenship.
She earned her undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley and her J.D. from Harvard Law School. Before joining the Berkeley Law faculty, she practiced at Gibson Dunn in San Francisco, clerked for two federal judges, and completed fellowships at Harvard and Stanford Law School.
Atkinson’s work has been published in top journals, including the Harvard Law Review, Columbia Law Review, and California Law Review. In 2022, she won the American Constitution Society’s inaugural Ruth Bader Ginsburg Scholar Award, which recognizes an early-career scholar who personifies Ginsburg’s dedication to excellence, fairness, and the ability of the law to foster both.
A front row seat to brilliance
Berkeley Law is “a wonderful place to be to grow in a scholarly sense,” Atkinson says, and she’s excited that the associate dean role will push her even closer to her colleagues. During the school year, various faculty present their works in progress at weekly lunch presentations. Last spring, Atkinson says she got excellent comments from her colleagues on an early draft of a project.
“As associate dean, I’m getting to see the brilliance up close in ways that I would ordinarily just see in the workshop,” she says.
Atkinson can also see how what she likes and is good at in the classroom — reveling in watching 1Ls transform into legal thinkers over the course of their very first semester, for example — makes her a strong fit for the associate dean role. Friends joke that she’s a cheerleader, and she says she does enjoy the role of encouraging success in others.
Whether she’s talking to students or colleagues, she says it’s gratifying to help others travel the same road she was on just a few years ago.
“It’s clear to me that the things standing in their way have nothing to do with who they are and their intelligence. It’s the systemic things that tend to get in people’s way,” Atkinson says. “It’s not the only thing about this job, but it’s maybe the most interesting part: The chance to be a cheerleader and a guide.”