Jesse Wall

Please tell us about your Oxford journey.

I arrived in Pembroke College, Oxford, in Michaelmas 2008 to ‘read for’ the BCL. I was straight out of my undergraduate degrees and terrified by the place. I was taught by brilliant people, made wonderful friends, and I wanted the suspended adolescence to last as long as it could. I then enrolled into the DPhil under the supervision of Professor Jonathan Herring, which was the best decision I could have made. After the doctorate, I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to be a Junior Research Fellow at Merton College.

Now that you have some distance from it, what do you value most about having pursued a DPhil in Law at Oxford?

I knew at the time that my teachers were good, but I can now –with some distance from it– appreciate how good they were (and still are). It is a beautiful university, with a long history, and curious traditions, but Oxford is Oxford because of the people, and I got to learn from some truly brilliant people.

How did your path develop after Oxford, and how has the experience of studying there shaped the way you have engaged with academia, both in the UK and internationally?

After Oxford I returned to New Zealand and started work as an academic. After coming from New Zealand (and then returning to New Zealand) studying in Oxford was great opportunity to learn about the law of another (albeit similar) jurisdiction. The research agendas of academics and postgraduate students were (and still are) diverse, and I learnt a lot about other traditions of inquiries, other preoccupations and concerns, and other ways of thinking about the law. The postgraduate community at Oxford was (and I am sure, still is) an international community. I got to work alongside some excellent scholars who are now leading academics in all parts of the world, with whom I am still in touch with. 

Your research interests cover a wide range of areas, including jurisprudence, medical law and property law. How has working across these different fields shaped your understanding of criminal law and the way you approach questions within it?

One of the many things I learnt from studying at Oxford was observing how some scholars develop a methodology (a manner of reasoning about things) rather than focus on a subject matter (a field of inquiry). From attempting to mimic this, and from moving between fields of inquiry, I have learnt what is at stake in different areas of law. For the criminal law, the state is prohibiting conduct, where that conduct is wrongful in the sense that it is antithetical to the values that the state is responsible for promoting, which then licences the state to punish the wrongful conduct, and which heightens standards of proof and procedural safeguards, and solicits public officials into all parts of the procedure. So, there is a lot at stake in criminal law! And since the state is involved, criminal law theory probably draws upon more political philosophy than I am comfortable with.

Consent is a central theme in your work across both medical and criminal law. Given the Law Commission’s forthcoming review of consent in the criminal law, do you think the current law in England and Wales requires reform to make it more coherent and predictable?

It is interesting how the Law Commission has framed the problem: “the law remains unsettled, incoherent, and unpredictable”. I think that is probably true, and it is in part because there is so little law on consent. By which I mean, consent is a question of fact that the criminal law under-determines. There might be good reasons for this under-determination, allowing for context-sensitive findings, and allowing for people to relate to one another on their own terms, for instance. But as the Commission notes, other jurisdictions are defining and redefining consent (as I try to do so in Sex and Self-Ownership), so it may be time for England and Wales to do the same. One of the tensions that I explore in the book is navigating the dilemma between the criminal law prescribing for us our sexual scripts, and the criminal law merely describing the sexual practices that people might practice. Neither is without problems. That remains part of the law reform challenge in this area.

You have worked extensively on the law of sexual offences, most recently in your book Sex and Self-Ownership. There, you support a reconceptualisation of sexual offences through a second-person perspective, based on the defendant’s ‘consent-astuteness.’ Could you tell us more about this approach and why you think it offers a valuable way of understanding sexual wrongdoing?

This is an interesting question, because the second-person perspective and consent-astuteness does a lot of heavy lifting in Sex and Self-Ownership, and I don’t properly acknowledge it. 

Let me start to answer the question with a pretentious quote: Husserl once said, “Even God can grasp a physical thing only in profiles”. Our experience of a thing necessarily obscures some elements of the thing. A cube, for instance, can only be perceived three sides at time. When it comes to sex, we might directly perceive the body of the other person, but not their mind. ‘Consent’ then becomes a choice between the first-person perspective of the consenting person (the consenting attitude in fact), or the second-person perspective of the person relying upon consent (their consent astuteness). Since the criminal law is concerned with punishing wrongful conduct and blameworthy attitudes, I suggest that the consent astuteness of the defendant ought to be the focus. Which you might think is letting the defendant ‘off the hook’, but I don’t think Sex and Self-Ownership does that. Instead, I try and assess what it means to be consent-astute.

In your work on sexual offences, you have emphasised the importance of defendant’s reasons for acting. In particular, in relation to the reasons capable of grounding a mistaken belief in consent, you have argued against considering ‘all the circumstances’ and instead proposed limiting them to complainant-specific reasons expressed through their words or overt actions. Given the shift from the honest to the reasonable belief standard, why do you think there is still a need to further restrict the defence of mistake in sexual offences?

I have never found the shift from an honest belief (where the finders of fact can take the unreasonableness of a belief as evidence that the belief was never genuinely held) to a reasonable belief (where the finders of fact can determine for themselves what beliefs are reasonable) to be much of a shift. Limiting a mistaken belief in consent to complainant-specific reasons is a significant shift. Why is it needed? As far as Sex and Self-Ownership is concerned, it follows from sex being a pro tanto legal wrong, that calls for a justification or excuse, where complainant-specific reasons are how a person can discharge the duty of being consent-astute. But, in the back of my mind, I was interested in the provocative question (not properly explored in Sex and Self-Ownership) of why a complainant needs to be examined, at all, in a criminal trial. It is the defendant on trial, and their (mistaken) belief in the consent of the complainant at issue, so the only relevant evidence can be the defendant’s complainant-specific reasons for the belief in the complainant’s consent, which only the defendant can evidence or fail to evidence.

What are you working on at the moment, and where is your research taking you next?

At the moment? Whether the principle of numerus clausus ought to apply to trust property. A far cry from sex, consent and the criminal law!

You are now looking back on Oxford from the other side of the experience. If you could share one piece of advice with your younger self and with students today, what would you want them to know?

Respect the environment that you’re in, but don’t let it intimidate you. For me, studying at Oxford was a big step-up, and I had to work hard to keep up, but I achieved things I didn’t think I would. And whilst hindsight is wonderful thing, I would encourage my younger self to be less fearful of the people and institutions, and more open to the possibility that you might be capable of keeping up with the peloton.

And finally, what has been your favourite thing to do in Oxford outside of academic life?

It’s probably a cliche for an antipodean Rhodes Scholar to say this, but cricket and football. I have a silo of fond memories of wearing Pembroke-pink and playing low-level sport with college friends. Looking back, I probably needed something to take my mind off intimidating tutorials, impossible reading list, bruising oral exams.

This interview was conducted in August 2026 by Emmanouela Kritikou (DPhil in Law candidate, Green Templeton College, Oxford).