The American Society for Legal History has announced the winners of its 2024 book prizes. This post is dedicated to the John Phillip Reid Book Award. About the award:
The John Phillip Reid Book Award is awarded annually for the best monograph by a mid-career or senior scholar, published in English in any of the fields defined broadly as Anglo-American legal history. The prize is named for John Phillip Reid, the prolific legal historian and founding member of the Society, and made possible by the generous contributions of his friends and colleagues.
This year's award went to Dylan C. Penningroth (University of California, Berkeley) for Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights (Livewright, 2023). The citation:
Grounded in extensive and painstaking research in local court records, Dylan Penningroth’s Before the Movement brings to life ordinary African Americans’ multiple interactions with law and the legal system in the century that preceded the Civil Rights Movement. In making visible African Americans’ legal tenacity and sophistication when it came to everyday disputes over property, contract, and church governance, Penningroth shows not only that African Americans used the law for purposes that cannot be reduced to their struggles against racial oppression, but also how such uses of the law laid the groundwork for those struggles. As such, Before the Movement profoundly reshapes our understanding of the history of American civil rights.
Congratulations to Professor Penningroth!
-- Karen Tani
