It is with great sadness that we mark the passing of Professor Andreas von Hirsch, one of the most influential criminological thinkers of his generation and a figure whose work shaped international debates on penal theory and criminal justice ethics.
For more than three decades, Andreas played a central role in the intellectual life of the University of Cambridge. While he was most readily associated with the Institute of Criminology, he maintained a distinctive and enduring connection with the Faculty of Law. His Honorary Professorship was created by the Faculty, reflecting the unique role he played in bringing together the intellectual communities of Law and Criminology. Through his pioneering research, teaching and mentorship, Andreas helped establish Cambridge as a leading centre for normative criminology and inspired generations of students and scholars around the world.
Andreas will be remembered not only for his profound influence in his field, but also for his generosity, collegiality and commitment to the University's academic community. His legacy continues through the many people and ideas he inspired, and through the Andreas von Hirsch Chair in Penal Theory and Ethics, established following his transformative gift to the Institute in 2021.
The full obituary written by Professor Anthony Bottoms is available here and in the text below.
Manuel Eisner, Wolfson Professor of Criminology; Director of the Institute of Criminology
OBITUARY
Andreas von Hirsch (1934-2026)
I first came across the name ‘Andrew von Hirsch’ in the late 1970s. He was the Executive Director, or principal staff member, of a prestigious Committee for the Study of Incarceration that had been set up by the US-based Field Foundation. The Committee’s Report (Doing Justice, 1976) was published under his name, and it became one of the key texts of a strong movement – both in the US and more widely – that aimed to curb the excesses of the ‘rehabilitative ideal’ and to promote, in relation to sentencing, the principle of ‘just deserts’ (i.e. that the punishment should be proportional to the seriousness of the crime).
Earlier in his career, von Hirsch had studied philosophy and then law at Harvard University, and he had been employed as an adviser to a US senator. But his work with the Incarceration Committee prompted him to move to an academic role, and he became a faculty member of the Graduate School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, New Jersey, staying with them for nearly two decades. During this time, he wrote many books and papers that greatly developed the case originally sketched in Doing Justice (most notably Past or Future Crimes, 1986; Censure and Sanctions, 1993). What emerged from this work was – in very brief summary – a censure-focused communicative theory of punishment; this holds that censure is of central moral significance within state punishment because it sends a message to the offender about the wrongness and the degree of seriousness of his or her crime. Interestingly, this theorisation began to be utilised in several legal jurisdictions, so it was becoming truly influential, although sometimes controversial.
von Hirsch was a Europhile, and in the early 1990s he started to make regular visits to England, including Cambridge. It was then that I first met him and learned about his background: his parents were among the many who had left Germany in the 1930s because of the threats posed by the Nazi regime. That history, not surprisingly, made him deeply suspicious of any authoritarian regime, and sceptical also about communitarian theories in political philosophy. It also explains the use, in his publications, of two different first names, ‘Andrew’ and ‘Andreas’. Andreas was his birth name, but in the US he adopted its anglicised version, and it was only much later (circa 2010) that he reverted to Andreas. However, as this was his final preference, I shall use it here.
Andreas clearly enjoyed his several visits to Cambridge, and we were glad to arrange for him to do some teaching in penal theory. One day he came to my office and asked if there was any possibility that he could join our staff permanently. I said that unfortunately we didn’t have any vacant posts at the moment, to which he replied ‘I don’t need money’. I was astonished, because I then had no knowledge of his personal circumstances. From that conversation emerged the very happy outcome that in 1995 Cambridge University appointed Andreas as Honorary Professor of Penal Theory and Penal Law in the Institute of Criminology.
After his move to Cambridge, Andreas quickly became a much-valued member of the Institute community. Of course, he continued to pursue his own research and writing (see further below), but he also engaged widely with other staff members, and with students, in a spirit of genuine openness. He taught both graduate and undergraduate classes with a liveliness and attention to detail that the students appreciated. He also took on the role of principal organiser for the Institute’s public seminar series, and in that capacity he took the chair for most of the presentations. Then when, in 1997, the new Labour Government commissioned the Institute to write a report on whether an increase in the severity of sentences would deter offenders, he gladly agreed to lead the research team (Criminal Deterrence and Sentence Severity, 1999).
In 1999, Michael Tonry succeeded me as the Institute’s Director, and he soon decided to create special topic-focused ‘Centres’ within the Institute. One of these was the Centre for Penal Theory and Ethics, with Andreas as its Director. During the decade 2000-2010, he led four research colloquia in this Centre, at each of which leading experts would present papers that were later refined and published as a volume in the series Studies in Penal Theory and Ethics, which Andreas had arranged with Hart Publishing. Two of these volumes were focused on traditional penological topics (Restorative Justice and Criminal Justice, 2003; Previous Convictions at Sentencing, 2010), while the other two ventured into areas that were less well trodden by normative analysts (Ethical and Social Perspectives on Situational Crime Prevention, 2000; Incivilities: Regulating Offensive Behaviour, 2006). The introductions to each of these volumes reveal that each project was either wholly or partly funded by the Penal Theory Centre; what they don’t say is that the Centre’s funds were wholly provided by Andreas himself.
In addition to these projects, Andreas’ personal research while in Cambridge had three dimensions. One was a continuation of his work on sentencing, and here the major text is Proportionate Sentencing: Exploring the Principles (2005), co-authored with his close friend Andrew Ashworth, Professor of English Law at Oxford. Secondly, from early in his time in Cambridge Andreas worked with Andrew Simester (then a college research fellow, later a professor of criminal law at the universities of Nottingham and Singapore) on the topic of ‘criminalisation’ (that is, the normative principles that would justify making a given type of behaviour a crime). Early research papers on this subject later culminated in a major joint book (Crimes, Harms and Wrongs, 2011).
Andreas’ third research focus saw him increasingly engaging with German criminal law scholars, partly on theories of punishment and sentencing, but also more broadly. According to Antje du Bois-Pedain (2023)[i], he had ‘an important influence on German scholarly debates at a time when penal theories there were still divided into either “absolute” (broadly, deontological) or “relative” (broadly, purpose-oriented and mainly utilitarian) theories’. These engagements eventually led Andreas to accept, in 2007, a post as Honorary Professor of Law at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, and he moved to Frankfurt at that time.
Andreas was happy in Frankfurt, and he once commented to me that he had found German society to be warmly welcoming to ‘returners’ (that is, to people like himself whose families had felt forced to leave in the 1930s but were now returning). Naturally, he continued to be actively interested in legal and philosophical topics, and he published a retrospective ‘overview’ of his work in penal theory (Deserved Criminal Sentences, 2017). He also kept in touch with the Institute, especially the Penal Theory Centre, whose activities he continued to fund. In September 2016, with his support, the Centre organised a colloquium on censure theory to mark the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Doing Justice. Andreas attended this event, and in due course he wrote a short but important chapter for the ensuing book (Penal Censure, 2019): it is important because it revises his previous theorisation of the relationship between ‘censure’ and ‘hard treatment’ in punishment theory.
In 2021, Andreas became a major benefactor to the Institute. He donated £2.5 million to the University of Cambridge in order to establish ‘in perpetuity’ the Andreas von Hirsch Professorship of Penal Theory and Ethics in the Institute of Criminology. This is only the second established Chair in the Institute (the other is the Wolfson Professorship of Criminology), and Andreas’ gift was the largest benefaction to the Institute since the founding grant of the Wolfson Foundation in 1959. Not surprisingly, therefore, both the then Director of the Institute (Professor Loraine Gelsthorpe) and I made warmly grateful speeches during the Discussion of this matter in the university’s Regent House (Cambridge University Reporter, 10 June 2021, pp. 698-99).
Following this gift, Andreas was invited by the university to become a member of its Guild of Benefactors and to have his name recorded on the Benefactors’ Staircase at the Old Schools (the historic heart of the university). So, in April 2022, he made his final visit to Cambridge to be received into the Guild. Ill-health restricted his activities on that occasion, but Professor Gelsthorpe arranged a lunch in her college at which senior members of the Institute were able to meet with Andreas and express their thanks.
Loraine Gelsthorpe had ended her Regent House speech by saying:
It is indeed unusual for an individual to make truly major contributions to an academic department by way of both scholarship and endowment. The Institute of Criminology today honours the name of Andreas von Hirsch, who has done so much for the Institute since he joined us as an Honorary Professor twenty-five years ago.
To emphasise Andreas’ ‘truly major contributions to … scholarship’ in the field of penal theory, it should be added that during his lifetime there were published not one but two Festschriften (books of scholarly essays in his honour) - see Ashworth and Wasik (1998)[ii] and Simester, du Bois-Pedain and Neumann (2014[iii].
But I want to close this memoir on a more personal note: as someone who worked closely with Andreas during his time in Cambridge, I count it as both a privilege and a joy to have known him.
Anthony Bottoms, Emeritus Wolfson Professor of Criminology, University of Cambridge; Director of the Institute of Criminology 1984-1998.
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References
[i] du Bois-Pedain, A. (2023) ‘Hirsch, Andreas (Andrew) von’ in M. Sellers and S. Kirste (Eds) Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy. Dordrecht: Springer.
[ii] Ashworth, A. and Wasik M. (Eds) (1998) Fundamentals of Sentencing Theory: Essays in Honour of Andrew von Hirsch. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[iii] Simester, A.P., du Bois-Pedain, A and Neumann, U. (Eds) (2014) Liberal Criminal Theory: Essays for Andreas von Hirsch. Oxford: Hart Publishing.