Cory L. Atkins attended Independence public schools, earned an undergraduate degree at Rockhurst University and studied law at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. His circuit biography records his early work in the attorney general’s office and later clerkship at the Supreme Court of Missouri. The circuit’s directory puts his Division 17 in the Eastern Jackson County Courthouse.
The geography of a court
Kansas City and Independence both appear in accounts of the Sixteenth Circuit. For a reader attempting to reconstruct a proceeding, the county alone gives an incomplete address. The division, the courthouse and the capacity in which the person signed the paper are more useful identifiers. A judge who once clerked for another judge can appear in several kinds of source over a professional lifetime.
From the editor in Independence
As a local historian, I take an interest in the schools and public buildings that connect a profession to its community. The public biography supplies those connections for Atkins. A local press can give them the attention a statewide list of officeholders seldom does.