Welcome to my website! I’m Alex, late 20s and living in London. I’m interested in radical left-wing ideas and practices for transforming society and the world for the better, because things could be so much better. I write things sometimes, either for other publications or this blog, and also have the Interconnected Law project for transforming our legal systems. I also do and coach parkour (that website is here), enjoy being out walking and cycling and music quality time with people and a bunch of other hobbies and movement disciplines I am interested in but don’t have enough time to do properly.
My background and the story I tell about myself professionally. 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. I then worked for a couple of years as a Parliamentary Assistant for two Labour MPs. Currently, I’m getting just about enough income from a part-time job as an Operations Manager for a small campaigning project and coaching parkour, and trying to spend more time on writing things and Interconnected Law and thinking about what to do next.
Here’s a summary of interconnected law: 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.
I started parkour 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