My name is Zachary Herz, and I am an Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Colorado Boulder. I hold a J.D. and a Ph.D.; my research focuses on how law functioned within the political and social environment of the Principate.
Put another way, I am trying to answer the question, “What did Romans talk about when they talked about law?” My current book project, tentatively titled The God and the Bureaucrat: A Political Analysis of a Severan Legal Project, considers how different political actors came to invoke bureaucratic legalism as a desideratum over the course of the late Severan period, and how this messaging choice transformed what we call ‘Roman Law.’ Other projects include studies of citation practices under Severus Alexander and the concept of arbitrary violence in Cassius Dio; I have previously published on the role of credit and default in Cicero, as well as on contemporary American antidiscrimination law.
(There was a pretty bird)
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