What I did yesterday (October 26 2011)

I have these strange and eventful days since arriving at Oxford.

I woke up a little late (9 AM) because I hadn’t slept well in the night, after drinking some champagne and wine the night before. My first activity of the day was to attend a sentencing seminar that I audit, which is co-taught by Professor Andrew Ashworth, who seems to have written or co-written almost all of the really influential texts in sentencing law in Britain; and by Professor Julian Roberts, also an eminent sentencing expert who’s written a bunch of books and sits on the Sentencing Commission, and incidentally is my D.Phil supervisor. Each professor brought a friend along to class — Prof. Ashworth brought Andrew von Hirsch, who is an emeritus honorary professor at Cambridge and at Goethe-University Frankfurt and who co-wrote a bunch of books with Ashworth, Julian brought Allan Manson, a professor from Queen’s University, in Ontario, who is also a criminal lawyer and sometime judge. The four of them asked the master’s students (and me) questions about the relative merits of sentencing guidelines (which allow for greater consistency of results and also ensure that a more unified and therefore fairer philosophy of sentencing is in place) or judicial discretion (which give the process more flexibility to respond to individual circumstances and which also — this is just me speaking — have the advantage of giving us some room from scary evil governments; but then you’re in the hands of judges, some of whom will also be scary and into harsh punishment). And they listened attentively to the students’ answers, and then asked them follow-up questions.

From there, I went to the year’s first meeting of the Criminal Law Discussion Group. The meetings are held in the charming Hovenden Room of All Souls College, which has an ornately carved wooden fireplace and we had tea in china cups and saucers. All Souls is the place that originally prompted the coining of the term “ivory tower.” It’s this college where there are no students — as far as I know this basically means that for anybody whose appointment comes straight from All Souls and not from a university department, they have no actual obligation to teach, and could spend their whole lives reading and writing and eating good food. Of course they don’t — Professor Ashworth is at All Souls but he still teaches the sentencing seminar, as well as other stuff. This year’s convenor of the criminal law group, Nicola Lacey, is also at All Souls. Professor Lacey, who is possibly the most charming academic I’ve ever met (she’s really warm, friendly and funny and seems genuine but also commanding), had us go around the room and introduce ourselves. The talk, by two youngish academics, was about addiction and its effect on a possible defence of intoxication, and looked at sources like the AA manual to try and formulate a notion of responsibility for an addict’s behaviour while intoxicated that might be in line with how addicts themselves understand their level of moral responsibility (the answer was, they see it as very high, but we still think there should be some partial defence; it was in retrospect a little unfortunate that their conclusion didn’t have all that much to do with the bulk of the paper). A long discussion followed, and the two seemed really happy after to have had so much criticism, and said they would use it to improve the paper.

It was a few minutes too late to run back to the Centre for Criminology and go to a D.Phil student’s lunchtime seminar on the death penalty in China, so I ran some errands and ate lunch on my own. Overheard cell-phone conversation on High Street: "But my friends are, like, all secret geniuses, and, like, when I ask them if they've read a book...."

Then I went to my desk and finally did about two hours’ worth of work, mainly finding articles on police abuse and the effects that might have on sentencing for the person abused (and then convicted of a crime during the investigation of which they were abused). This isn’t my main D.Phil topic, I’m writing a separate article.

In the afternoon, I met up with two friends and went to the experimental psychology building to participate in a group study on hypnosis. There was no reason for this, we all just thought it might be fun. I wasn’t sure whether I would be more interested in being hypnotized or being someone who wasn’t subject to hypnotic suggestion, but either way I was interested. The experiment was in an auditorium, and there were about 20 of us there and the post-doc psychologist hypnotized all of us in a group. Anyhow, it seems like I’m fairly prone to hypnosis, though I felt like I was in control and could have snapped out of it at any time. Afterwards I felt intensely intensely drowsy, and the guy rehypnotized me and got me to feel more awake. That actually worked, and is probably the clearest effect where I didn’t feel like it was kind of me making it happen. In any case, I really enjoyed it. Hard to say why. Also, before the experiment I was not so impressed with the post-doc, but by the time the hypnosis was over I felt like I trusted him a lot. Weird.