Ruth Herz

Ruth Herz studied law in Geneva, Munich and Cologne where she earned her doctorate in law. She was a judge at the court of Cologne, Germany from 1974 until 2006. She introduced the “victim offender mediation and reparation” scheme, as an alternative sanction for juvenile offenders, into the German legal system for which she received the Medal of Merit (Bundesverdienstkreuz) of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1998. From 2001 to 2005, while on leave from her judicial position, she played the part of the judge in a daily fictional court series on German television. She has taught criminology at the University of Toronto and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. From 2006 to 2010 she was Associate Researcher at the Centre for Criminology of the University of Oxford and was a visiting fellow at Princeton University in 2010-2011. She is currently a visiting professor at the School of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London. She is interested in law and popular culture especially in law and images. She is working on the role, and the everyday practice, of judges through drawings produced by a judge while sitting on the bench, as well as on the portrayal of justice on television. She has published extensively. Her latest book The Art of Justice: The Judge’s Perspective was published by Hart Publishing, Oxford in 2012.