James White

Senior Graduate Teaching Assistant

Hi , welcome to my staff profile. Do reach out by email or message if you have any questions or would like a meeting in person/teams.

Role

My role as a GTA is to undertake teaching tasks within a class, seminar, and tutorial or equivalent context in order to progress student learning. I will delivering some of the lectures in Criminal Law, which I work on as a Postgraduate Researcher (PGR). I'm a PGR rep for the Law School's Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) committee. I am a member of the Criminal Justice Centre (CJC), and convener for the reading group Radical Reconstruction Redux.

Research

My research concerns the relationship between the moral truth within general human interaction and the ‘legal truth’ of the courtroom which filters and supplants this. Procedures of proof and legal language limit what can be found and what can be said, and present what is found as infallible and certain. Against this, we must recognise that law’s judgment is not only fallible but at least often incapable -in a deep ontological sense- of grounding certainty. I explore where these issues show through in legal discourse, for example in appellate judgments for quashing orders and the Scottish ‘Not Proven’ verdict which notably permits uncertainty to remain. I am building a Critical Realist theory of truth in order to focus the relationship between legal and moral truth, based in Roy Bhaskar’s work which underscores that the nature of truth extends beyond the epistemic to the ontological domain. This yields a conception of moral truth that is communicative and interpersonal.

Teaching