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Institute of Advanced Study
External shot of Institute of Advanced study at Cosin's Hall

Dr Zachary Herz

IAS Fellow at John Snow College, January - March 2027

Contact DetailsDr Zacahary Herz headshot

 

Zachary Herz is an Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Colorado-Boulder. He is trained as both a Roman historian (Ph.D., Columbia University, 2018) and as an attorney (J.D., Yale Law School, 2014), and his work combines those two theoretical schools in order to better understand how law structured Roman ethical and political thought.

Dr Herz is the author of The God and the Bureaucrat: Roman Law, Imperial Sovereignty, and Other Stories (Cambridge 2025), which argues that the corpus of documents we know understand to constitute “Roman law” should be understood less as a law-code than as an archive of political imagination. Various actors within Roman administration used the structures of ‘law talk’ to think about worlds that might be fairer, safer, or more predictable than their own and in doing so created the doctrines that later authors would treat as the foundation of European liberal legal order. In addition, Dr Herz is currently editing (along with Serena Connolly, Elsemieke Daalder, and Matthijs Wibier) the proceedings of the conference Empire of Correspondence, which was supported by a Collaborative Research Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Dr Herz has published several peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on law and culture from the Roman imperial period, with a special interest in the interplay between autocratic politics and the regulation—legal or otherwise—of gender and sexuality. In addition to IAS, Dr Herz’s work has been supported by the Loeb Classical Library Foundation, the Benson Center for Western Civilization, and the Center for Humanities and the Arts.

While an IAS fellow, Dr Herz will investigate the role of pity, or clementia, in the ideological foundations of Roman imperial governance. He is particularly interested in stories of imperial mercy, and how they work to simultaneously elevate emperors above existing legal frameworks and to reaffirm their subsumption within broadly recognized normative milieux. He also hopes to complete a monographic research guide for the Brill Research Perspectives Series, entitled Roman Law for Historians, introducing students of Roman history to the unique difficulties and complexities of Roman legal archives.

 

Events

TBC