Rate My Professor Julia Tolmie

Professor Julia Tolmie is a professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Auckland, where she has been employed since 1999 and promoted to full professor in 2018. She serves as Associate Dean (Postgraduate - Research). Prior to this, she lectured for ten years in the Faculty of Law at the University of Sydney from 1989 to 1998. Tolmie holds an LLB(Hons) from the University of Auckland obtained in 1987 and an LLM from Harvard University in 1988. Her teaching portfolio includes Criminal Law, Advanced Criminal Law, Criminal Law and Policy, Women and the Law, and Law and Social Justice.

Tolmie's research specializations are in criminal law, family law, and women and the law, with a key focus on how the law understands, constructs, and responds to vulnerability and precarity, particularly in women's lives, including issues of intimate partner violence and coercive control. Her scholarship is well-cited. Key publications include "Corporate social responsibility" (1992), "Defending battered women on trial: The battered woman syndrome and its limitations" (1992, co-authored with E.A. Sheehy and J. Stubbs), "Fathers’ rights groups in Australia and their engagement with issues in family law" (1998, co-authored with M. Kaye), "Coercive control: To criminalize or not to criminalize?" (2018), and "Social entrapment: A realistic understanding of the criminal offending of primary victims of intimate partner violence" (2018). She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society Te Apārangi in 2022. Tolmie served as chair of the New Zealand Family Violence Death Review Committee from 2011 to 2016 and deputy chair in 2017, member of the New Zealand Government’s Expert Advisory Group on Family Violence in 2013, academic member of the District Court Judges Education Committee from 2015 to 2017, and member of the Institute of Judicial Studies Curriculum Working Group on Family Violence. She was the inaugural Shirley Greenberg International Visiting Scholar at the University of Ottawa in 2016 and a distinguished visiting scholar with the Gender and Family Violence Research Program at Monash University in 2018. She edited the Law School’s alumni magazine Eden Crescent from 2003 to 2014 and served on the editorial boards of the Sydney Law Review and Current Issues in Criminal Justice.