Dr Jackson Allen

I joined the University of Sheffield as a lecturer in February 2022. Before this, I was a lecturer at the University of York and also taught criminal law and evidence at the University of Edinburgh.

I am from the US originally, but have been living in the UK since 2013, when I moved from my home in Texas to Nottingham, where I spent three years at the University of Nottingham studying for an LLB and LLM in Human Rights Law. Following this, I moved to the University of Edinburgh to pursue my PhD, which I completed in 2022.

Generally, my research and teaching interests are in criminal law and the law of evidence, with a particular focus on theorising criminal procedure and bringing philosophical perspectives to bear on aspects of the criminal process which are under-theorised. For example, my PhD focused on the relationship between ‘reverse’ burdens of proof (i.e., those placed on the defendant) in a criminal trial and the presumption of innocence.

The issue of how to resolve the underlying tensions between these reverse burdens and the presumption of innocence is a typical example of the types of questions that interest me most: those which take the seemingly simple and mundane aspects of criminal procedure and ask what they are for, how they work, and how they ought to work.

Currently, my research is focussed on the structure of liability under the modern criminal law, and how this fits with our traditional thinking about the underlying principles of criminal liability and responsibility.