Welcome to my website! I’m Alex, late 20s and living in London. I’m passionate about transforming society and the world for the better, because things could be so much better.
My main work at the moment is around legal theory, and I am on the MPhil/PhD programme at Birkbeck, University of London. It’s about transforming our legal systems, based on a different paradigm/worldview for thinking about the world and law, how we should think about law in a socio-ecologically holistic way. There is a summary below on this page and more about this on the Interconnected Law website.
I write things sometimes, on this blog or for other publications. I also do and coach parkour, thatwebsite is here. When my health and energy allows — I have a couple of variable chronic conditions — I enjoy being out walking and cycling, music, quality time with people, and there are a bunch of other hobbies and movement disciplines I am interested in but don’t have enough time to do properly.
My background and professional story, in a neat narrative form which edits out the more chaotic reality: I studied law (undergraduate and LLM) in which I broadly studied more political aspects of law, including human rights law, environmental law, public law and jurisprudence/legal theory. During my undergraduate (Oxford University, 2011-15) I was awarded the Prize in Jurisprudence for getting the top mark in the legal theory module. After that, I worked on a few projects as a research assistant for a few law professors and a research consultant for an NGO, then worked for a couple of years as a Parliamentary Assistant for two Labour MPs, which I moved on from during the pandemic, after which I got my income from coaching parkour and doing a couple of freelance and part-time roles.
More about Interconnected law, here is a summary: our current legal system sees us all as individuals and focuses on individual freedom; yet instead we are all interconnected. We live in a network of relationships — social relationships, economic and material relations, and the relationship we have with the rest of our natural world — and our legal system should recognise this and work to improve these relationships. We should transition to legal systems which are based on human interconnection, look at relationships instead of rights, and help us live harmoniously with the rest of nature. As well as the website about the project, I’ve written an article for the Ecologist which gives an introduction and a long read for openDemocracy which sets out the overall idea in more detail.
More about parkour: I started practicing over ten years ago, though it isn’t the only movement discipline I’m interested in, it is the only one I’m good enough to teach! You can read more about it on my parkour website. I train it because as well as being fun, it works a range of physical skills and includes working on mental aspects such as fear, discomfort and anxiety. I coach it because I want to share the transformative power it has to improve other people’s lives too.
To contact me, email: alex(at)alexmay.co.uk