Professor Jonathan Herring
Professor of Law, Faculty of Law; Fellow of Exeter College
Professor Jonathan Herring focuses on how the law interacts with the important things in life: not money, companies or insurance; but love, friendship and intimacy. In his work he seeks to develop ways the law can recognise and value the good in activities such as carework and sex, while protecting people from the harms that so often result. He draws particularly on the feminist ethic of care and relational theory in developing his thinking. Professor Herring works in family law; medical law and ethics; criminal law and disability law.
Academic profile
About
Professor Jonathan Herring writes on criminal, family and medical law. He has written on a broad range of areas including theoretical issues in family law, domestic abuse, children’s rights, the nature of marriage, the regulation of pregnancy, enforced medical treatment, the medical and legal definition of sex with particular consideration of intersex people, the law on sexual offences, crimes against corpses, failures of parents to protect children from death, the law’s treatment of older people, legal issues surrounding dementia, the law’s treatment of caring and how adopting an ethic of care could transform the law.
Expertise
- Family law
- Criminal law
- Elder law
- Medical law and ethics
- Sexual offences law
Selected publications
- Shifting the Spotlight in the Law of Rape (Anthem Studies in Law Reform, 2025)
- Medical Law and Ethics (OUP, 2025)
- Family Law (Pearson, 2025)
- Criminal Law: Text, Cases, and Materials (OUP, 2024)
- The Right to Be Protected from Committing Suicide (Bloomsbury, 2022)
- Domestic Abuse and Human Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2021)
Media experience
Professor Herring has experience of working with the media, including broadcast work with BBC Radio 4 and 5.