ACS Washington State: Telegraph Torts: The Lost Lineage of the Public Service Corporation

Please join the ACS Washington State Lawyer Chapter as we host Evelyn Atkinson for a virtual discussion about her paper “Telegraph Torts: The Lost Lineage of the Public Service Corporation." In this paper, Atkinson, a Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago, details the emotional responsibilities held by certain public service corporations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and links this history to the contemporary debate about the modern role of public utilities, particularly as to how those duties might be applied to online platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. As Atkinson writes, "[a]lthough not completely analogous, the telegraph cases offer the possibility of a complimentary paradigm to our more limited modern-day understanding of the public utility corporation—one that links specific important services to heightened public responsibilities, and understands corporations as moral actors that are embedded in a web of social relations, rather than purely profit-driven market actors."

A copy of the forthcoming article can be found at the link: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4232347