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 book, The God and the Bureaucrat: Roman Law, Imperial Sovereignty, and Other Stories (Cambridge 2025), 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.’ I have also published on Imperial writing around cinaedi, jurisidictional politics in Cassius Dio, and the role of credit and default in Cicero, as well as contemporary American antidiscrimination law.
I am currently writing a monographic guide to working with Roman legal archives, entitled Roman Law for Historians. If you have any questions about how legal sources work that have come up in your own historical research, please reach out! I’m happy to help, and knowing what problems people run into will make my own book more useful.
Please use the navigation tools above if you’d like to see my curriculum vitae, links to my publications, PDFs of some of my current and previous syllabi, or if you just want to get in touch.