Torie Atkinson

Position: Senior Staff Attorney
Email: tatkinson@dralegal.org
Attorneys

Torie Atkinson joined Disability Rights Advocates in 2018 as a Staff Attorney and became a Senior Staff Attorney in 2022. At DRA, she has represented individual and organizational clients on a wide range of issues, including in litigation challenging the inaccessibility of street crossings for blind pedestrians, the lack of stair-free access to the NYC subway, the exclusion of children with diabetes from school, and the denial of wheelchairs, prosthetics, hearing aids, ASL interpreters, and other disability-related aids for people in correctional facilities.

Prior to joining DRA, Ms. Atkinson clerked for the Hon. Judge Eric N. Vitaliano in the Eastern District of New York before working at Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division as an Honors Trial Attorney in the Employment Litigation Section. There, she litigated employment discrimination and veterans’ rights matters, and was awarded the James R. Douglass Award for contributions to LGBT rights for her work on behalf of transgender North Carolinians.

Ms. Atkinson received her B.A. magna cum laude from Barnard College in 2006, and her J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School in 2015. At HLS, she was the Executive Managing Editor of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, where her Note on the criminalization of poverty through municipal fines and fees was published, and received a Pro Bono distinction for her over 1,500 hours of public interest work. She was awarded a 2014 Ford Foundation Fellowship to work at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and interned at the National Center for Law and Economic Justice, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Justice, the WilmerHale Legal Services Center, and the New York Attorney General’s Office Civil Rights Bureau.