Research Bio

Dylan C. Penningroth teaches and writes about African American history and legal history. His most recent book is Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Civil Rights (Liveright, 2023). By looking at the changing meaning of civil rights, Before the Movement seeks to change the way we think about Black history itself. Weaving together a variety of sources—from state and federal appellate courts to long-forgotten documents found in county courthouse basements, from family interviews to church records—the book tries to reveal how African Americans thought about, talked about, and used the law long before the marches of the 1960s. In a world that denied their constitutional rights, Black people built lives for themselves through common law “rights of everyday use.” Before the Movement recovers a rich vision of Black life―a vision allied with, yet distinct from, the freedom struggle. 

The right to make contracts is central to our economic fortunes, and to American law. In "Race in Contract Law" (University of Pennsylvania Law Review 2022), Penningroth shows that some common-law rules and major doctrinal and theoretical problems in contract law are historically intertwined with race, but, over time, that racial presence has become almost invisible. Left with a blinkered view of law's history, judges and law schools have grasped for flawed concepts like colorblindness to guide them. 

Penningroth has published two books, most recently Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights (Liveright 2023), which won eleven book prizes and was shortlisted for four more. His articles have appeared in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Journal of American History, the American Historical Review, and TIME. Penningroth has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the MacArthur Foundation. 

Before joining Berkeley Law in 2015, Dylan Penningroth was on the faculty of the History Department at the University of Virginia (1999-2002), at Northwestern University (2002-2015), and a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation (2007-2015).

Research Expertise and Interest

African American history, U.S. socio-legal history