New Tulane Law faculty bring expertise in areas from civil rights to energy law

A number of new faces are joining the faculty ranks at Tulane Law in the fall, including an international expert in energy law, as well as scholars in civil rights and gender law, constitutional law, comparative law and human rights and finance, banking and corporate law.

Freddy Sourgens was named the James McCulloch Chair in Energy Law and the Director of the Energy Law Center.  A Tulane Law graduate from the class of 2005, arrives from Washburn University School of Law where he was the Senator Robert J. Dole Distinguished Professor of Law. He is an international leading expert in energy law, international energy transactions, and arbitration.

For more on Sourgens’ appointment, go here. 

Carla Laroche has been named the Felder-Fayard Associate Professor of Law and joins the faculty to teach Criminal Law, Evidence, a Criminal Justice Seminar, and other related courses.  Laroche comes from Washington & Lee University School of Law where she was an Associate Clinical Professor, founding and directing the Civil Rights and Racial Justice Clinic. 

Laroche has dedicated her career to increasing access to justice and opportunities for systemically excluded communities. Her scholarship addresses barriers to access to justice, with a focus on criminal law, gender, race, civil rights, and family law. Her research analyzes how people navigate civil legal systems and seek to access their civil rights when they have criminal arrest and conviction histories. Her work has been published in the Boston University Law Review and Columbia Journal of Race and Law, bar journals, and newspapers.

Laroche received her Bachelor’s degree from Princeton University, a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard University, and her J.D. from Columbia Law School.

Evelyn Atkinson has been named the Charles E. Lugenbuhl Associate Professor of Law. Atkinson will be teaching Constitutional Law, a seminar on Race, Law, and Capitalism, Legal History, and related courses.

Atkinson’s areas of expertise include legal history, constitutional law, and tort law, with her scholarship taking an interdisciplinary approach to exploring corporate constitutional personhood.

Atkinson's scholarship has been published in the Virginia Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, Journal of Law & Social Inquiry, the Law and History Review, the Yale Journal of Law & Humanities, and the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender. She has been a Robert Gordon/Stanford Law School Fellow at the J. Willard Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History and a Doctoral Fellow in Law & Inequality at the American Bar Foundation.

Her book manuscript, under contract with Columbia University Press's Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism series, is entitled American Frankenstein: A History of the Constitutional Corporate Person in the Nineteenth Century. Atkinson also is the recipient of the Kathryn T. Preyer Award from the American Society for Legal History and the Fishel-Calhoun Article Prize from the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.  

Atkinson graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and received her J.D. from Harvard University.  She also received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago where she has also been serving as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Law, Letters, and Society.