The Center for the Study of Law and Society 

is pleased to announce the first speaker in the Spring 2020 CSLS Speaker Series

DYLAN PENNINGROTH

Professor of Law and History at University of California, Berkeley

Speaking on his research

“Race and Contract Law”

This paper analyzes the legal and practical materiality of race in Contract law by assessing the role that African Americans played in its making. The paper begins to recover a significant but mostly invisible stratum of cases involving African Americans threading through case law, state codes, law journals, treatises, and teaching casebooks during what was, arguably, the formative era of American contract law, roughly between 1880 and 1950. It then describes how African Americans dealt with contract law in their everyday lives. The paper then seeks to explain why so much of this case law and this history of everyday use is buried—to analyze when, and why, legal professionals highlighted or suppressed the fact that litigants were black—and it speculates about what those choices have meant for law students and professors. It concludes with some normative recommendations about the structure and implicit assumptions of the law school curriculum.

­

Please join us on Monday, January 27 from 12:45-2:00p in the Philip Selznick Seminar Room, 2240 Piedmont Ave. 

Coffee and water are provided. We invite you to bring your own “bag lunch.”

We are looking forward to seeing you soon!

Catherine Albiston, Faculty Director

Pamela Erickson, Executive Director