Professor Julia Tolmie currently teaches Criminal Law, Criminal Law and Policy, Women and the Law and Advanced Criminal Law at The University of Auckland. Prior to her appointment at the University of Auckland in 1999 she lectured in the Faculty of Law at the University of Sydney for ten years. Professor Tolmie researches in criminal law, family law and feminist legal jurisprudence. A theme throughout her research has been how the law understands, constructs and responds to precarity - particularly in the lives of women. Her research won the Auckland District Law Society Writing Prize for NZWLJ (2019), the Non-Traditional Research Category at the inaugural Australian Legal Research Awards (2020), a Faculty Senior Research Prize (2020) and an Auckland University Cable Research Impact Award (2021). She was the lead author in the recently published text: Tolmie, Gledhill, Te Aho and Quince, Criminal Law in Aotearoa New Zealand. She served as chair of the New Zealand Family Violence Death Review Committee from December 2011-2016, deputy chair in 2017, and as a member of the New Zealand Government’s Expert Advisory Group on Family Violence in 2013. She was the academic member of the District Court Judges Education Committee in 2015-2017. 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 the University of Monash in 2018. She served on the expert panel for several references of the New Zealand Law Commission in 2015 and has provided peer review on multiple reports for government and non-government organisations on matters relating to criminal law and family violence over the years. She was the editor of the Law School’s alumni magazine – Eden Crescent – from 2003 to 2014 and the NZULR in 2020-2021, as well as serving on the editorial board of the Sydney Law Review and Current Issues in Criminal Justice. Professor Julia Tolmie also has an interest in the fine arts and a practice as a painter and sculptor. Although she is New Zealand born of English/Scottish heritage, her immediate and extended family closely links her to the beautiful island of Samoa.
