Research Expertise and Interest

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

Research Description

Dylan C. Penningroth specializes in African American history and in U.S. socio-legal history. His first book, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), won the Avery Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians. His articles have appeared in the Journal of American History, the American Historical Review, and the Journal of Family History. Penningroth has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the Stanford Humanities Center, and has been recognized by the Organization of American Historians’ Huggins-Quarles committee, a Weinberg College Teaching Award (Northwestern University), a McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence (Northwestern), and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship.

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).

In 2022, Penningroth published "Race in Contract Law" (University of Pennsylvania Law Review 2022), a historical investigation of how and why American legal professionals have alternately highlighted race--or hidden it--in one of the most foundational areas of law. It shows that contracts scholars, judges, and lawyers have frequently relied on cases involving African Americans, racial metaphors and analogies, and theories about slavery to develop common-law rules and to think through major doctrinal and theoretical problems in contract. But, over time, that racial presence has become almost invisible. This has had important but unacknowledged implications for law school teaching and for modern courts. 

Penningroth's most recent book is Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Civil Rights (Liveright, 2023). Through an empirically-rich historical investigation into 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.