Dylan C. Penningroth teaches and writes on legal history, race and law, and African American history. His new book, Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Civil Rights (Liveright, 2023), explores how ordinary Black people used and thought about law in their everyday lives, and how Black legal activity and Black legal thought helped shape American law and Black social movements from the 1830s to the 1970s. Before the Movement was awarded eleven book prizes and was shortlisted for four more.
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 University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 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, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the MacArthur Foundation.
Before joining UC Berkeley in 2015, he 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).
At Berkeley, Penningroth has had the privilege of advising brilliant PhD students in both the History Department and the Program of Jurisprudence and Social Policy (JSP), on a broad range of topics.
For office hours, see Jurisprudence & Social Policy / Legal Studies.
For more information, see Penningroth’s personal website.
Education
B.A., Yale University (1993)
Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University (2000)
Dylan C Penningroth is not teaching any Law courses in Fall 2025.
Courses During Other Semesters
| Semester | Course Num | Course Title |  Teaching Evaluations | Spring 2025 | 375P sec. 001 | Teaching Learning in Higher Education | View Teaching Evaluation | Fall 2024 | 209 sec. 001 | JSP Orientation Seminar | View Teaching Evaluation | Spring 2024 | 375P sec. 001 | Teaching Learning in Higher Education | View Teaching Evaluation |
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