 Well, I'm delighted to welcome you all today. I'm Scott Newton, the head of law here. And I realize you may be in different positions. You may be interested in coming to SOAS. SOAS may already have asked you or invited you to come to it by extending you an offer. But in any case, I want to explain to you why studying at law is different than studying at any other law school in the UK. And indeed, I would make bold to say elsewhere on this planet. What makes us different at SOAS? Why come to study law at SOAS? Now, you may have heard that we're a specialized institution that we're boutique. That's actually not the case. We may be modest sized in terms of the scope of our faculty and the size of our student body. But we're a lot bigger on the inside, just like the TARDIS. And if you come inside, you will find the entire planet. What we do here at SOAS is we offer you an extraordinary range of what we could call legal geographies. Now, you'll see immediately that this is a map that looks upside down. Well, let me tell you that to us, this is a map that's orientated just the right way. Because what we offer here at SOAS is a global south facing and global south premised take on law. So when I say legal geography, we of course mean the way in which law works and has come to condition all of the places that you see on the map here with the south at the top and the north on the bottom. But we're also interested in the way that law has come to shape and condition the way the world looks in the conventional representation with the north on top. So that's sort of the fundamental geography of the world with the north on top and the south on bottom. Isn't that, in fact, a legal geography? And law has a lot to do with borders and demarcations and hierarchies. So let me tell you a bit more about that. One of the things that we offer you at SOAS is research led teaching. Now, we all do very interesting and I think unusual for many law schools kinds of research. And what we look at, what we investigate, what we spend our lives dedicated to, we bring into the classroom. We teach you, right? So among my colleagues, we have people who look at, for instance, international humanitarian law, the law of armed conflict. But we do that from a particular perspective. So we look at the role of gender, for instance, in peacekeeping. And one of my colleagues has looked at incidents of sexual abuse on the part of UN peacekeepers. So that's some of what we do. That's some of what we study. We bring that into the classroom. We look at things like the role of Islamic finance in the world, what sorts of Islamic financial products are on offer, what difference that makes. That's also something we bring into the classroom. We have a whole range of planetary research interests. We look at climate change. We bring that into the classroom. And to give you a concrete sense of what I mean, and I know Michelle will give you, as the day wears on here, a broader sense of what we offer. But just to give you a snapshot, I mean, if you come here, you'll do the core seven pillars, so-called, in your first year and a half. But once you get it to the second year, you'll have a range of options which bring into the classroom precisely the scope and range and depth and breadth and diversity of all our respective research interests. So you can take courses like Foundations of Human Rights Law beginning in your second year or Introduction to Global Commodities Law, which is, of course, I happen to teach, which will tell you everything about the role of global commodities in shaping our world and the role of law in shaping global commodities from the Portuguese voyages to the coast of Africa in the 15th century, which commenced the slave trade on down through the Spanish conquest, the rivalry between the Dutch and British East India companies in the 17th century, right on down to coffee commodity chains and Starbucks in the present. You can take other courses like Law and Society in South Asia or Africa, Law, Terror and State Power, Asylum and Immigration Law. There's a very wide range of actively researched subjects which we will bring to you directly in the classroom. Now, let me tell you a bit about what distinguishes us. Again, we have a fundamental concern with the qualities, gender equality, racial equalities, sexual equalities and many of us spend our lives looking at the way in which law has shaped patterns of inequality and the way law has served as a powerful tool and remedy for that inequality. We all of us share a belief that law has a presence and a significance far beyond the justice system itself, which obviously we'll acquaint you with. So far beyond the bounds of courtrooms and cases, we will look at the role law plays in the background. Behind the walls and under the floorboards, law is the secret wiring of the world and we'll help you understand why we think law conditions and shapes so much of what we just take for granted about the world we share. For that reason, we think law is a privileged analytic tool and if you come to law school here, you will understand much about the way the world works and is organized. And you might not have thought initially that law had a great deal to do with it, but we'll make you understand why we think law has a fundamental role in shaping the way markets work, whether those are formal markets or informal markets, law is ubiquitous. We'll help you to understand what law has to do with flows of people, migration flows, refugee flows, why law is an important part of the conditions which dispose people or force people to leave, to flee and what it is about law that is significant in the places they go to, how law shapes and conditions their reception or their integration or their rejection from the society, from the societies they seek refuge in. We'll tell you about why law is very significant in separating and demarcating people and population and places. Now, this is the wall that runs through the occupied Palestinian territories and law has a great deal to do with that wall and indeed was fundamental to it's being erected in the first place, but law itself creates all sorts of walls, walls which aren't striking and visible and overpowering and overshadowing like this one, but nonetheless run through lives. We'll tell you why we think law has a great deal to do with apparels of climate change that the planet as a whole is facing, both the human and the non-human. Components of the planet will lead you to understand why law has brought us to the edge of the precipice and what law can do to bring us back from the brink. Now, we want you to get used to the fact, to accept the fact that you will leave so as very different to the way you came in if we've done our job. So we want to push you out of your comfort zones. You may have come to so as with pretty well set ideas and cherished notions about things but we wanna shake you up and indeed we see that as our job. So if you come to so as, I want you to be prepared to be shaken up. I want also to take note of the fact that you in particular are coming to so as or contemplating coming to so as at a very distinctive historical conjunction, right? This is the moment obviously of the pandemic which is a thoroughly novel set of circumstances which has confronted all of us. Wherever you are now located, you are contending with a singular global phenomenon. Law has a great deal to do with that. Law has a great deal to do with the reason the pandemic has spread in the way it has done and with the kinds of efforts and measures that people are putting into place to fight it and to shield us from it. And also with its differential impact on populations and places. It's also a moment when the Black Lives Matter movement has come to the fore again and people have come to understand that a racial reckoning is now on the horizon, a racial reckoning which is centuries overdue. And the fact that this racial reckoning is occurring just at the moment of the pandemic is not accidental. Because it's so as we think those are interrelated phenomena and we think that law has a significant role in both of them. That is, law is fundamental to the way in which pathogens spread and the ways in which people cope with them, the ways in which societies combat them and the differential impact on societies and on populations within societies. And we also think that law has a great deal to do with race. That law is fundamentally a racial category and that the racialization of the world with the consequences of which we're all now still grappling was in many ways a legal phenomenon from slavery on down to the present. So let me leave you with a sense of the things you can do with law. Now, I realize that many of you may now be contemplating a conventional legal career and I use conventional in quotes here but you may decide that you want to join the solicitors for them become a barrister. If you do that, you will do that with the so as difference with the so as perspective. So you will get every bit the breadth and depth of an English LLB education that you would get in any of our competitor law schools. We will give you an absolutely solid grounding in English law. But we will give you the so as difference as well. We will give you the benefit of our particular global south facing perspective and you will take that into a career as a barrister or a solicitor. But there are other things you can do with law as well. And I want to leave you with a gallery of lawyers and people with legal training who have gone on to do unconventional things on the basis of legal training. So let me leave you with this and remind you that we're unconventional law school and we expect you when you graduate to do unconventional things even if you do those unconventional things in a conventional context. So here is my gallery of legal heroes. Now you might not have realized that all of those people have a legal career or legal training in common, but they do. And on that note, I will turn you over to my very capable colleagues who will give you a kind of cook's tour of what we have on offer for you here at SOAS. So I'm happy to answer any questions now. If anybody wants to respond to issues, concerns, I'll hang around for a bit, but I'm going to turn over the chairing duties to my colleague, Michelle. Oh, Michelle, you're on mute. Sorry. Thank you very much, Scott. And welcome everyone. I'm so impressed by the chat that we're getting through here on your motivations for coming to law. I can tell you already that all these are very much in keeping with being a law student, SOAS. Mona says she wants to help people in her country in Syria. Well, Mona, I'm happy to let you know that many of the academics who are teaching you have in fact worked in their home jurisdictions outside of England, helping their fellow colleagues and NGO advocates in their own right. So for example, Dr. Nima Sultani, who will teach you public law, was a human and civil rights lawyer working for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, petitioning the Supreme Court against the Israeli army in the West Bank. And he was then a researcher for a research center in Haifa on civil rights of Palestinian citizens in Israel. Similarly, Dr. Mayor Suresh, who will teach you property law, was an advocate and one of the represented voices against 377 in India for several years. Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, criminalized adult and consensual sexual acts deemed to be against the order of nature, which of course is a colonial legacy of the criminal code in India. Dr. Suresh worked tirelessly again on cases at the highest levels of the Indian courts system to have that law overturned. Myself, I will be teaching you criminal law, which is of course the subject we're discussing today. I worked in Cambodia with the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights for several years with lawyers and judges, activists, lawyers and judges who were trying to reform the Cambodian criminal justice system. We worked on trying to ensure that the extraordinary chambers in the courts of Cambodia, which was set up to try and prosecute war crimes and genocide committed during the Khmer Rouge period, that their jurisprudence could form part of the manner in which criminal procedure was understood at the domestic level. So we're all here really as practising lawyers and advocates in our own right, and also scholars in that we believe that as Scott has very clearly outlined, law is an instrument of power. It's about the relationship between people and law is really the underlining architecture of the way in which society operates and understanding that and being able to utilise that for those who are faced with inequality and injustice is fundamentally part of how we teach law, it's so us. So without further ado then, I'm going to share my screen and start us off on the taste of lecture, which I promised, life, death and law, when is murder, murder. So let me share this with you now. Can everybody see that? Let me know if you can't, otherwise I shall kick us off on our discussions. Yes, we can see it. So just briefly before I begin the lecture, here is a snapshot of the people that you'll be taught by and discussing and contemplating the law with over your degree. These are some of the participants of the law school, the scholars in the law school. There I am, the last one. Oh, second last, Dr. Farida Banders, I'm last. This is who we are and we hope that you'll come and join us. As you can see, I think we are a diverse group of scholars from all five continents of the globe and we're here in London geographically to really teach law as we see it as an instrument of social change. Just briefly on the teaching format, ordinarily, you'd have a SOAS campus, a two-hour lecture and a one-hour tutorial for most of your subjects in first year. We now have a SOAS blend format, which includes of course interactive webinars and we anticipate that that blend will continue to into the next academic year, although we hope and are very much looking forward to returning to campus, even although we may offer some online format. The interactive approach is both synchronous and asynchronous in that we have lectures uploaded, which you can watch at your leisure on video, as well as having interactive tutorials. In general, the assessments are 20% essay and 80% exam just to give you a sense of what the assessment would look like ordinarily. And what's law like? Well, very essentially, law is a course about reading, thinking and creative problem solving. But as you point out in your comments, we too think that law challenges our understanding of society through thinking about the problems in a legal sense, as Maymuna said. It's about understanding the system, as Rano said. It's about helping people. It's about speaking out against injustice. So how does that work in the context of murder? Well, when is murder, murder? What comes to mind for you when you think about murder? When you think about murder, you may have in your mind the popular conceptions of it that exist in, as I've illustrated here through the pictures on the screen, various forms of crime drama. This is just a snapshot of some of the things available on Netflix at the moment, both within the United Kingdom and from the film and television industries in India, in South Africa, I've got there, Russia and also in China. The crime drama, of course, is generally very popular. Murderers in crime dramas tend to be seen as the bad guys and are usually associated with things like drug related offences, assault or other forms of physical harm. Well, they could be on a crusade, a form of vigilante justice, something like Walter White in Breaking Bad, for instance, would be a sort of archetypal vigilante, crusading against his poverty and being unable to pay for his cancer treatments. Well, sometimes it involves criminally insane suspects who are psychopathic. That's often what is at the center of crime drama. You may even notice when you watch crime dramas that there is an unconscious bias often in the scripts and the selection of who is good and who is evil can sometimes be prone to this. Who is depicted as responsible for crime in these kinds of dramas? Well, ordinarily, it tends to be poor people, it may be people of color, there may be various things that come into play when thinking about who is at the center of crime. And that's something we can discuss a bit further at the end of this lecture. But today I wanted to take you through murder as a criminal offence and to talk through what I would argue the out of bounds of the offence. In order to understand murder, however, we need to first and foremost understand the law. And as a law student, that's of course what we think is centrally important to anybody that leaves so us. In addition to fighting against injustice, you have to know the law inside out. That's the only way you're going to be able to assist your clients. And in the most basic of terms, we can see murder is essentially divided into two aspects or elements of crimes. And in fact, this is central to all crimes. So we call this the guilty act on the one hand. In other words, the conduct, the circumstances and the result of the crime. What actually happened? Who did what? And then also the guilty mind aspect of a crime. And here we're really thinking about what was the person's intention or purpose when the acts were committed? Did they actually want to kill somebody or were they reckless as to that person's death? Were they merely negligent? It wasn't even that they intended or were reckless, but their actions having, if in effect, inadvertently resulted in somebody's death. And we break that down when we think about murder into things called actus reis, which is the Latin term essentially for guilty act. And the actus reis for murder, as you will see, if you come to study it, so ask, is the unlawful killing of a human being under the queen's peace. Under the queen's peace simply means that it's not war time. So it's unlawful killing of a human being. And that's really what we're going to be talking about in the majority of the next 10 minutes in that we're going to be looking at when is that killing, when is a human being a human being, first of all, and when is the killing in fact unlawful? And then we look also at guilty mind. So that aspect is the intention to kill or cause grievous bodily harm for the crime of murder. So for murder, you have to intend to do the activity, but you don't have to intend to kill. You can just intend to hurt somebody really, really badly. And that will be sufficient to bring a charge of murder, which is very, very contentious in the criminal law because many lawyers believe that you shouldn't be holding people accountable if they didn't actually intend to kill someone. And that's debated very much in the literature. But of course, when we think about crime and we think about murder, we always have to think about context. As so as lawyers and law students and scholars, context is essentially important. And here I have an art exhibition. I just wanted to share with you of Julie Goff. She's an Aboriginal Australian living in Tasmania whose art looks at re unearthing the histories of the Aboriginal population in Tasmania and trying to rethink and think through settler colonialism as it manifested in the last 200 years in Australia and its impact on Aboriginal people. So murder, of course, in that context, there were many Aboriginal people killed at the hands of both the state and of individuals during the last 200 years who have not been held criminally responsible for those deaths. I think Julie Goff's statement here, to think about the past differently, to realize you can learn more, nothing is fixed or frozen or definitive. That to me is also central to the study of the law because law is really about interpreting facts from a particular situation in the past, realizing and understanding what that situation brings about, what it means and remembering that the law itself is not fixed, it's not definitive. It evolves, it changes over time as do social laws. So very briefly then, if we think about life, when is a human being a human being? Now, that might seem like a pretty logical question or obvious question. Well, Michelle, we're all human beings, aren't we? What are you talking about? What do you mean by that? Well, essentially, I'm asking you to think about when life begins. Can we say life begins when at the moment of conception or is it at the moment of birth itself? Well, in the law in England, since 1874, it has been determined that life begins at the moment at which the child is no longer dependent on his or her mother. And here we have a quote from Justice Brett from that case saying that life begins when breathing and living by reason of breathing through its own lungs alone without deriving any of its living or power of living by or through any connection with its mother. What happens, however, in the situation when one life depends on another? And this came to the courts in 2001 in the case of A. In A, the partisan question that the victims were a set of conjoined twins. So in other words, Siamese twins. And one of the twins' life was dependent on that of the other. The parents, however, of the twins in question would not agree that either of the twins should die in order for the other to survive. They were devout Catholics and they believed that God had given them the children as conjoined twins and it should be up to God to decide in this respect. However, the doctors involved believed that it was in the best interests of the child of one of the twins if they in fact terminated the life of her Siamese sister. This was because the life that they intended to terminate in this instance, that Siamese twin was not going to be able to survive for any length of time beyond birth. And as such, the doctors in question determined that her life should be, had to determine or wanted her life to be terminated. So the question came to the courts as to whether or not doctors in this instance should be allowed or permitted to make this determination. And it was determined that in this instance, doctors should be committed because while the wishes of the parents were entitled to the greatest of respect, the court was obliged to determine the issue on the basis of the welfare of the children and the welfare of the children in this respect should remain paramount. So in A, in fact, the life of one of the twins Mary was terminated. Another situation in which law has to grapple with life and death is, of course, understanding when death occurs in and of itself. Now, this initially seems obvious when it might occur, but when we think through whether or not causing death in fact amounts to killing, again we see that law has to make difficult determinations about when and at what point life can be terminated. In general, euthanasia is prohibited in the United Kingdom. However, there have been instances in which the courts have had to determine both issues of mercy killing and assisted suicide, both of which have come to the courts and asked them to determine at what point then can a person claim either to kill someone out of mercy or that they have the right to die. In the case of Inglis, this was an issue because a mother attempted and was subsequently successful in ending the life of her son who had suffered an incredible injury and was in much pain in hospital and subject to a reduction in his quality of life. Although the doctors had said that Inglis's son could would in fact be able to return to a normal life, she was unable to believe this and administered heroin to him to the point of his death. The courts had to determine in that instance whether that could be considered murder or whether there should be a reduction to voluntary manslaughter, which is essentially when the person has a defense against murder for what they've done, a partial defense. In Inglis, it was determined that regardless of the motivation, mercy killing can still be considered murder in that respect. And despite the fact that it was clear that his mother had only the best intentions and was only most caring of her son, it was still, it still amounted to murder. In Pretty, the issue of the right to suicide was also considered by the courts. In Pretty, the claimant was suffering from a terminally ill disease, but could not herself administer the drugs to bring about her suicide and had wanted her husband to do so and a notification from the Department of Public Prosecution that her husband wouldn't be criminally responsible for her deaths. The House of Lords determined in Pretty that there is no right to die in this respect and there was no way in which under those circumstances she could get such assurance. Pretty took her case to the European Court of Human Rights and the right to live under Article II of the European Convention on Human Rights was determined not to include the right to die. Society, it was determined, should not have to determine such issues in favor of the party in question. There was an absolute right to life in this respect. The courts do distinguish, however, between such cases and end-of-life cases where the acting question does not in fact assist someone in dying, but fails to continue to sustain their life when they're in a permanent vegetative state. In other words, where their brainstem has been so injured that they are unlikely to recover from a permanent vegetative state. And this was the issue which came to light in the case of Bland in 1993. Anthony Bland was a 17-year-old who died after the Hillsborough disaster, which was a situation in which fans of football fans were in fact suffocated to death due to an inability to get through the turnstiles of the football stadium at the time. And in Bland, it was determined that when a person is in a permanent vegetative state, the doctors can have the right to end such life because there is no possibility that the person in question will recover. And up until very recently, it was required that medical professionals sought the permission of the courts in order to do so. But in 2018, in the case of Y, this was in fact now determined that medical professionals can make this determination without having to seek permission from the courts. This, of course, has deep set ramifications and implications in the current context in light of the fact of COVID-19, meaning that several family members may be in such a situation. So the question, of course, which arises and which I hope we will have a few minutes, unfortunately, only a few minutes to discuss in the question time, is really, are these decisions right? Is this the manner in which we think law should be determining life and death scenarios and should it be up to the courts to determine these issues or should it be left to the family members involved? What is the role of law in this respect and how should it be interpreted? One way to understand the role of law is to say that it is to safeguard individual autonomy and indeed autonomy is at the heart of the criminal justice system in this country. But we must ask ourselves, whose freedom is in fact being upheld and for what purpose? Proprietary interests, for example, come into play in a number of cases, one of which captured a lot of media attention was that of trespassers against property who were killed at the hands of Morgan in 2001, and Martin, sorry, in 2001. But it's also the case in terms of determining when a life should end and who should have the freedom to choose that if not the person themselves. A second issue which law has to think about and which we grapple with as lawyers and law students and scholars is the extent to which law should protect public morality. In other words, where is the dividing line between law and morals and who again gets to decide? Should law have the right to be coercive when it's upholding social values which form the fabric of a particular social organization? Again, whose values get to decide in this respect and how do we decide? Is it through the courts, through the parliament or should it be the individual themselves? Finally, of course, we have to think through whether or not law in every instance is ensuring and securing social justice. I began this lecture by telling you that law is really about being an instrument of power and as such, whose rights are being determined to be upheld in these scenarios. When you come to SOAS, we'll think through a feminist rereading of criminal law in addition to what we've discussed today, looking in particular at the role of gender as a central organizing principle in English social life. What does that mean in terms of whose rights get prioritized in particular cases and upon what grounds? And to what extent has this changed in the law over the past 50 to 100, if not much longer, years? Additionally, we'll look at critical race theory and think through criminologically who in fact is targeted by the criminal justice system. Poverty and criminality are often associated with minority in inverted commas communities. And to what extent is that as a result of endemic racism in the criminal justice system and what should we as lawyers and as scholars do to change that? So thank you very much for joining me today. I do apologize that we do not have much time for questions. I'd really hope for a lot more because I really want to speak to you and not simply be the one talking. But I'll end my presentation here and hopefully we have a little bit of time, Tonya, to take any questions if there are any. Well, that's great. Thank you, Michelle. Yeah, we've got about five minutes, I would say. So I'm just going to pick out a couple of questions. One was just so as for the opportunity to work on pro bono cases. Yeah, so is there a clinical legal component? We are currently looking at furthering our criminal legal clinical legal components throughout the undergraduate degree. There are some courses in second and third year where that's a possibility and we're looking to see how we can further enhance that. Our head of pro bono, Clara Del Croce, is now is currently reviewing that as well. That's great. And there was a question about optional modules and do all the optional modules that you pick have to relate or link to the career you wish to pursue or can the decision be made purely out of your greatest interest? Totally up to you, absolutely. Personally, I think your law degree should be a time of exploration and imagination and just stretching yourself as far as possible into many different areas. I think that's really important because you don't really know until you leave where you want to go and it will evolve over time as well. So that would be my advice but certainly when you come, your academic advisor here at SOAS will be able to guide you through those decisions throughout your degree. And then there's a question about contact hours. How many contact hours usually does SOAS offer students on the LLB course? So contact you mean the actual teaching hours. Right. So it'll be two plus one for each. So four times three is 12. So it's about 12 hours in first year contact hours but that would include of course more or less depending on whether or not you're seeing your academic advisor that week and there are various other kinds of events that are on offer for undergraduate students but the actual contact hours will be a two-hour lecture slash seminar and a one-hour tutorial for four subjects in the first year. That's great. So I just want to let everyone know I might ask Sundas, our student ambassador who's joining to just finish the session with just a couple of comments about what it's like to be a student in the School of Law or at SOAS in general. If you don't mind me putting you on the spot. Yeah, of course. Hi everyone. It was really nice to have everyone here. I'm Sundas. I'm in my first year studying LLB here at SOAS. Generally I think that in the six months I've been here my experience has been better than I expected actually. I'm enjoying my course more than I thought I'd be. Like has already been emphasised, it's a very, very diverse university. It's definitely rewarding with the amount of critical thinking that you're putting into and the amount of analysis you're given as well to sort of incorporate in every module that you're given and every task you've given, which I think is challenging at first but it's something that definitely you have to get used to over time. I think that of course due to COVID-19 circumstances it's quite unfortunate that I wasn't able to really study on campus. But I think generally like despite all of that, I think that I'm still enjoying my course to its full extent. I think that, yeah, that's it really. I took A-level Law. So I think that definitely boosted the amount of knowledge I already had, which I think is a great advantage, but again, it doesn't put you in any disadvantage either because you still learn the basics from bottom to top. But yeah, I think that's it really. I'm enjoying it a lot more than I thought I'd be. So yeah. That's really nice to hear. I'm sure Dr. Kelsel likes to hear that from students. And just to let everyone know, we've run out of time unfortunately. It's been a really engaging, interesting session, lots of interesting comments, but you'll see in the chat that Dr. Kelsel has put her contact email address there. We will be circulating this recording to everyone who's registered. So you'll be able to watch it and see the chat comments and get more information. So I think I would just like to finish by thanking our panelists for their time and presenting today. That was really interesting. And thanking everyone for joining us today and hope you enjoy the rest of the somewhat sunny afternoon here in London. And we hope to see you at SOAs very soon. Thanks everyone.