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Sarah Hill Appointed Part-Time Criminal Law Lecturer at Bournemouth University

We are proud to announce that Sarah Hill has been appointed a part-time lecturer in Criminal Law at Bournemouth University. She is teaching on the undergraduate LLB Degree course for a 10-week period, taking seminars with first-year students. In this post, we chat with Sarah about her new and exciting role.

Congratulations Sarah! Does this mean you won’t be practising at Hill Twine Solicitors any more?

Thank you very much! And absolutely not! It is a part-time temporary appointment covering 10-weeks of teaching. My seminars are all on the same day and I am very much still working full-time at Hill Twine. I will be continuing with all of my commitments, both in terms of practising and management. It’s busy and getting busier! The firm is going from strength to strength and Kevin Hill and I are always striving to enhance the quality of the service Hill Twine provides to our clients. I’m really looking forward to teaching the students and it is undoubtedly the case that I will re-learn one or two things that I have forgotten.

That’s great news! What does the teaching at Bournemouth University involve?

To start with, I am taking four seminars a week. I am teaching Criminal Law, obviously! It’s the area of law I love and I have spent pretty much my entire professional career in Crime. They certainly wouldn’t want me attempting to teach anything else! Criminal Law is one of the seven compulsory areas of law an LLB Law Degree has to have and most universities include Crime as part of their first-year course. Bournemouth University is no different and so I am teaching Criminal Law to first-year students, building on the principles that are covered in more formal lectures.

What sorts of things will you be covering in the seminars?

Jamie Fletcher, LLM Programme Leader and Senior Lecturer at Bournemouth University, has designed a fantastic course, with lots of interesting, complex, and exciting areas of Criminal Law to cover. It starts covering some of the fundamental principles underpinning Criminal Law, such as actus reus and mens rea. These concepts are second nature to practising Criminal lawyers, but they can be difficult to understand to begin with. They are essential for Criminal Law students to understand before moving on. Essentially, the actus reus is the act or omission of a crime, mens rea is the mental element. So, for example, if you take the offence of theft, the prosecution has to prove that a defendant ‘dishonestly’ took property (known as ‘appropriation’) belonging to someone else, ‘intending’ to stop that person from ever having it back (otherwise known as permanently depriving the owner of it). The actus reus is the physical act of taking the property belonging to someone else, the mens rea is doing so dishonestly, intending to permanently deprive the other of it. If the prosecution cannot prove both the actus reus and mens rea, the defendant cannot be convicted of theft.

After these building blocks are taught, the course moves on to cover a wide-range of topics, including murder, manslaughter, other violent offences, theft, defences etc etc. Y’know, all the stuff that good crime dramas are made of!

Sounds very interesting! What do you hope the students will get out of it?

I have practised in Criminal Law for more years than I care to remember. Kevin and I recently realised that he became a solicitor twenty years ago, whilst I was called to the Bar twenty years ago and became a solicitor eleven years ago! I hope that the students will benefit from the vast amount of practical experience I have, both in terms of defending people accused of crimes and my HMCTS role as a Justices’ Legal Advice in the magistrates’ court. As with a lot of subjects, academic study can sometimes seem worlds away from the practical application and I hope the perspective I will bring will help bridge the gap. Any decent Criminal Lawyer has a library of sex, drugs, and violence stories (with the occasional sprinkling of rock ‘n’ roll) and I hope the ones I can tell will help bring the subject alive for the students. I remember when I studied for my own Law Degree, the stuff that was dry took a lot of time to sink in. It was, and definitely still is, the case that the more interested I was in something, the better I understood it.

To be able to represent a client properly, one of the key skills an excellent lawyer possesses is the ability to explain complex legal concepts in a way that can be understood. All clients have different needs and levels of understanding, and all of their circumstances are different. In practice, to do my job properly I have to be able to adapt what I am saying to ensure the information can be understood by the person sat in front of me, whoever that may be. I hope this carries over into my teaching and the students will benefit from this.

Well done you for taking up this opportunity at Bournemouth University. We wish you all the very best.

That’s very kind, thank you very much!

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