* Robert R. Wilson Distinguished Lecture

Dylan C. Penningroth, Professor of Law and Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, will deliver the 2024 Robert R. Wilson Distinguished Lecture, "Hidden Histories of Black Civil Rights." Professor Penningroth, who also serves as associate dean of Berkeley Law's Program in Jurisprudence and Social Policy / Legal Studies, specializes in African American history and in U.S. socio-legal 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. His first book, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (UNC Press, 2003), won the Avery Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians. Boxed lunches will be provided on a first come first served basis. Sponsored by the Office of the Dean. For more information, please contact events@law.duke.edu.